Superstar's Development Diary
Chapter 470 - 471: Two Major Challenges

Chapter 470: Chapter 471: Two Major Challenges

The synopsis sounded pretty thrilling, and He Jinxia had already received the complete script. While the crew was setting up the venue, she had roughly read through it and felt that the script was quite exciting too.

The entrepreneurial experiences and business wars described therein were very realistic, and indeed, the screenplay was adapted from the stories of real-life celebrities.

In the story, He Jinxia portrayed the first love of one of the male protagonists. Her character was a university student with excellent foreign language skills, attractive in appearance, and always able to attract the attention of fellow students.

Whenever there was a foreign language speech competition at the school, she was always the one called upon to participate.

In this scene, He Jinxia faced two major challenges.

One major challenge was how to use the empty set to build the character’s psychological state and expressions, performing actions consistent with the character, testing her imagination.

For example, if an actor had to perform the act of drinking water and had a transparent glass filled with water, the difficulty of her performance would drastically decrease—she simply needed to pick up the glass and take a sip.

If the actor was given a glass but it wasn’t filled with water, then the actor would have to pretend there was water and make a swallowing action, slightly increasing the difficulty of the performance.

And if the actor wasn’t given any props and had to perform the action of drinking from a glass, the difficulty would increase significantly.

The actor not only had to imagine a glass, but also had to perform the action of holding a glass, then imagine it being filled with water, pretending to swallow a sip.

With the same action in three different scenarios, anyone with a discerning eye could tell which scenario was easier to perform.

Trapped in the green screen, He Jinxia could rely only on her imagination and, if she really couldn’t figure it out, she might have to resort to simple props to build up her emotion.

The second major challenge within the act was the language.

Upon learning yesterday that He Jinxia was willing to come over immediately for the shoot, the director immediately called Luo You, expressing his gratitude and also making a small request—

He hoped that He Jinxia would do the dubbing in her own voice.

Films, unlike TV dramas, have stricter requirements for voice quality. They feared that using a dubbing actor for He Jinxia’s voice would make the audience feel disconnected.

Using her own voice for dubbing was the right thing for He Jinxia, but the challenge lay in her character’s setting. The character was a female student genius in foreign languages, and the film even included several minutes of English recitation!

He Jinxia had never learned a foreign language, and, motivated by Director Wilson’s invitation, had only crammed for a month, learning simple everyday communication.

Now, suddenly having to perform a foreign language recitation was no small challenge.

Luckily, dubbing wasn’t as urgent as acting; it could be delayed by a few days.

The director also mentioned that if it really didn’t work out, they could find a dubbing actor to do the job.

He Jinxia took a deep breath, focused her thoughts, and decided that if she were to do it, she would do it to the best of her ability.

Having already saved the day with a face-swap, perhaps she could break through her limits with dubbing?

"Alright, we can start shooting now!"

The voice of a crew member came through. He Jinxia gathered her thoughts from the script, her expression turned serious, and she stepped onto the area surrounded by green screens—that was her battlefield!

...

The filming process went smoother than the director had anticipated.

The director had thought that He Jinxia would struggle with expressions and actions. He had even asked the two male leads of the crew to come over beforehand, ready to step in and act with He Jinxia if necessary, to ensure that her performance was adjusted properly.

It turned out he was overthinking it.

Especially when he saw Jinxia smiling like a breath of spring at an ugly doll, her eyes tender as if she were looking at the lover of her dreams, the director’s hanging heart instantly settled down.

This actor, not bad!

In the crew, the two male leads stood to the side, quietly discussing.

Huang Jingzhi: "This actor is good, her acting is spirited, her imagination is rich, pretty good."

He Sheng: "Yeah, quite good. Have you seen the news recently? Her work was nominated for the Berlin Newcomer Special Screening Award."

Huang Jingzhi was somewhat surprised: "She’s Jinxia?"

He Sheng looked at him with resignation: "How long has it been since you’ve been online?"

Huang Jingzhi, a bit embarrassed, said, "Haven’t I been busy filming ’Crash Through the World’? Whenever I have time, I go and work on acting and voice dubbing.

My foreign language accent is really nonstandard, and my teachers wish I could forget everything and start from the simplest ABCD, so I haven’t really paid attention to the news in the entertainment circle."

Finally, as if to prove he wasn’t that out of touch, he quickly added: "But I do know about Jinxia being nominated for the Berlin Crystal Bear Award, you can be sure of that."

He Sheng’s lips twitched, "No, I’m not worried about you, I’m concerned for you, I’m afraid one day a queen of the screen might walk by and you’ll have to turn around and ask me: ’Hey, who is that? She looks so familiar.’ That would be too bad."

Huang Jingzhi grew even more embarrassed and whispered: "I’m not face-blind, I do remember people. I haven’t seen any of her movies, but I must have seen her photos. However, all female stars are beautiful, and after a while, they all seem to look the same."

"I’ve heard a lot about Jinxia. The most famous thing is that she crazily dropped from 200 pounds to a lovely 120 pounds. I thought for sure she would rebound, but when I met her today, she seemed even slimmer than the standard weight."

Huang Jingzhi said this, somewhat enviously: "How can she be so thin and not rebound!"

He Sheng, recalling comments on the internet, joked: "You don’t know, she actually has abs. You see her as thin, but she’s not thin at all, she just turned all the fat into solid muscle, hidden inside her body, not exploding yet."

"How does the saying go? If it doesn’t explode, let it be, once it explodes, it’s amazing — that’s her!"

Huang Jingzhi curiously said: "Really? I should ask her how she trains. I’ve always wanted to build muscles, but I feel what I train doesn’t look good."

While they were talking, Jinxia had already finished filming part of the scene and had entered her rest time.

This rest time wasn’t really about resting, as the language coach hired by the crew needed to correct her foreign pronunciation, allowing her to recite a segment smoothly.

Truly, there wasn’t a moment to spare.

Huang Jingzhi and He Sheng walked over together.

Jinxia, very humble towards the two seniors, stood up and politely greeted them.

He Sheng appeared more talkative, asking with a smile, "Decided to use your own voice for dubbing?"

Jinxia nodded: "The director said that using the original voice achieves the best effect, I want to give it a try."

After thinking a bit, she added: "Although I came over to help out at the last minute, I’m now part of the crew. I don’t want the movie to be criticized by fans because of my voice."

Basically, she didn’t want to be the flaw in the movie.