Fighting Satisfying, Drawing Satisfying! This New Face of Martial Arts Films—Did the Cinematography Come from Animators?!
“Not only in China — across live-action cinema around the world, many of the great storyboard artists come from an animation background.”
At the time of writing, Biao Ren: Wind Rises in the Desert had scored 7.5 on Douban, ranking first among Spring Festival films; with box office exceeding 1.3 billion yuan, it ranked second at the Spring Festival box office, passing the test of the “wall of masterpieces.”
The manhua’s author, Xu Xianzhe, personally drew a box-office celebration illustration, riffing on the “great worm” meme to congratulate the film.
Many comic artists also sent their congratulations to Biao Ren, along with congratulatory illustrations.
This is a long-overdue highlight moment for Chinese comic-to-film adaptations, and a long-awaited reunion as homegrown manhua returns to the public eye.
Behind the film lies the collective effort of countless crew members, including an animator familiar to many — Fei Si.
He is the director of “Don’t Listen,” the chapter animation short from Black Myth: Wukong, and the art director of the Biao Ren anime OP. This time, he was in charge of the film storyboard for Biao Ren: Wind Rises in the Desert.
Most viewers may not grasp what a “storyboard” is. In fact, this role plays a vital bridging function in film production — it can be called the “communication hub” that links every department and every stage of the process.
Academic Party specially invited Fei Si to share how he came to be connected with the Biao Ren IP, the real behind-the-scenes stories of the Biao Ren film shoot, and the ins and outs of doing storyboard work as an animator.
01 The Beginning of My Connection with Biao Ren
Fei Si: It started with the Biao Ren animation team wanting a highly stylized OP. I’ve collaborated with director Wu Nian many times, and we know each other’s styles very well, so we decided to try using animation to present the visual style of the rough, hand-drawn, sketch-like texture of the black-and-white comic. After a few experiments, we felt the idea was achievable, and some of the concepts we made back then actually made it into the final visuals.
Fei Si: When Eighth Master(Yuen Woo-ping)’s team began preparing the Biao Ren project, they first read through the comic and the anime. The highly stylized OP left a deep impression on them and planted a vague sense that it was “right” — even the initial project documents and the crew’s profile pictures used screenshots from the OP. Since I had worked on some film projects before, and a producer friend of mine was also involved in preparing the Biao Ren film, that became the opening for me to meet Eighth Master for a talk. I joined the director’s team in its founding stage, exploring some macro directions and concepts.
When working on the anime OP earlier, I had a concept in mind: hoping every frame would carry metaphors pointing toward the plot, so each image could both convey a feeling directly and, upon re-viewing, offer extended layers of information. That approach can only carry so much within the OP’s limited runtime, so after joining the crew, I also hoped to realize many of those unrealized ideas in a larger space.
Besides that, being an animator, I have a fairly accurate intuition about comic adaptations, and I can offer more possibilities when imagining and translating them into live action.
02 The Day-to-Day Work of Storyboarding
Fei Si: A storyboard is the draft of a film. During pre-production, after the screenplay is finished, the storyboard turns written content into shot imagery — it is the first step in visual presentation, from nothing to something.
In the past, the role of the storyboard varied with the director’s style. Directors with some art foundation or a visual bent tend to need storyboards more, while directors who lean toward the literary or favor on-set performance may not use them at all.
In the present day, the more industrialized a project’s pipeline is — especially high-concept works with strong digital presentation — the higher the demand for storyboards.
Several problems must be solved during storyboarding: First, establishing narrative rhythm — exactly how many shots it takes to build a sequence, what the order and relationships between shots are, what angles to shoot from, and how to block and stage. These require communicating with the director to understand their ideas, discussing with the director of photography, then offering possible solutions and realizing them as concrete, viewable material.
Second, it’s trial and error. For live action, the storyboard only establishes a preliminary impression; even a complete sequence remains far from the film’s final form. Things that seem fine at the storyboard stage can generate new problems when they collide with the various creative ideas realized across departments. Although filmmaking pursues a measure of certainty, everything is in flux, so rather than being certain about what we want, ruling out the directions we don’t want is almost as important. Otherwise, redundant creative and informational clutter piles up and the creative direction is lost.
Third, storyboards also help save costs. A key principle of the so-called industrialized filmmaking process is to use inexpensive stages to test expensive ones, increasing certainty for the stage that follows.
In communication, you always need a more intuitive format to unify everyone’s imagination — yet being intuitive already means it has been realized, and realization comes at a cost. To use an analogy: VFX spectacle, by definition, creates content that’s hard to imagine, and it’s expensive to produce, so relatively cheap previsualization is used to determine the direction of the effects; but previz isn’t exactly low-cost either, so storyboards are needed to settle the creative ideas and decide which parts get prevized; and even the storyboard, intuitive as it is, is still built on top of the literary screenplay, which is even cheaper to execute.
On the economic level, the storyboard serves as an “advance preview” of the entire film. Through the storyboard, the producer’s judgment becomes more accurate — one can even gauge the scale of investment from it.
Overall, storyboarding is a bridging job: it translates the director’s and screenwriters’ ideas into images, gives the director of photography a handle for preparing the shooting plan, gives the VFX supervisor a basis for anticipating previz and VFX workload, and gives the production designer references for choosing more accurate concept art and planning the sets.
One more point: storyboards and concept design sometimes run in parallel. After receiving the script, the color keys(atmosphere key frames) produced by concept design are also integrated into the storyboard, and key scenes designed in the storyboard may have color keys added retroactively as well.
Fei Si: Once the script was locked, the director’s team would meet together — including the director of photography, the production designer, the VFX supervisor, the action director, and the assistant directors. Everyone brought up creative ideas tied to their own departments and offered references. After the director chose a direction, storyboard production began.
There were also dedicated meetings with the director to go deeper into details. After finishing all his work each day and returning to the hotel, Eighth Master would also write text-based storyboards and creative notes. When we communicated, he would take out his handwritten notes and walk through the scenes with them. After the meeting, I would receive photocopies of the notes as reference — I prioritized the parts the director had confirmed, and the rest was room left for me to develop.
Fei Si: True, storyboards usually don’t require being on location, but we stayed in Karamay for three months(laughs). One reason is that the script wasn’t fully completed when filming began — much of the content had to be decided on site.
As a wuxia film built around action performers, Biao Ren is somewhat different from the usual way of storyboarding an industrial film. The script and the design of many scenes were adjusted based on on-the-spot improvisation. For example, if we spotted a beautiful bend of a yardang hill, we’d immediately discuss whether to add a set piece there or move a certain scene over. Sometimes new ways of fighting would emerge during fight choreography, and after confirming they were viable, we’d add storyboards on the fly — time was extremely tight. Many ideas like this came out of on-site collisions, and I could feel the improvisational agility and accumulated wisdom of the older generation of Hong Kong filmmakers.
Fei Si: Many ideas were tried out for the Heiniutan sequence. In the story structure, this segment is an extension of the so-called “playtime”(Fun and Games) — its function is to transform the relationships within the protagonist group, build trust, and also escalate the spectacle visually.
The director’s team had previously considered quicksand, underground caves, a yardang maze, and other options, and in the end we went with fire oil. Because there genuinely is a vast oil field near the shooting location — you can see countless pumps working across the barren plain, and the ground in that area can literally seep oil. We settled on this plan based on the overall tone of realism and credibility, as well as the visual impact of flames in night scenes.
During the discussion phase, the storyboard would also rough out each option so everyone had something to grasp and feel; directions that felt too fake, too abrupt, or too expensive without delivering effect were all rejected.
In the Biao Ren project, the storyboard’s focus was presetting the story’s atmosphere, narrative rhythm, and character motivations. Although I drew action sequences too, they mainly presented key movements and the key creative ideas built on staging and camera work.
When making animation, we put nearly all the action into the storyboard — the more complex the action, the more panels it takes. I believe many of today’s animation creators have built their understanding of action scenes on the wuxia and action films of Hong Kong’s golden age — and the very people who created those classic sequences were right there on set. The specific fight routines and combat were left to the professional stunt team.
This film was, in essence, a process of tradition and industrialization learning to accommodate each other. The Biao Ren crew could be said to have the world’s finest stunt team, with a highly systematic and professional approach to arrangement. Early on, it was unclear at all which parts should be traditional and which should be industrialized.
The storyboard and the director of photography focused on generating excitement through the shooting side — introducing new equipment and new shooting methods with complex staging, striving to produce a fresh presentation on top of traditional wuxia filmmaking. The action-director team, meanwhile, focused on delivering excitement from the concrete action design itself. In the end, all the information converged in the director’s hands, and the director selected the best parts to form the final presentation.
Fei Si: My biggest private motive for joining this project was to learn up close how Eighth Master, the “world’s number one action choreographer,” creates his work. At bottom, I’m an animator, and action-scene design is one of the most important forms of expression in animation. Being able to learn on the job this time was an especially big gain.
The exchanges with the screenwriters were also very rewarding. The Biao Ren writing team included not only Yu Baimei, but also the key creators of Reign of Assassins, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Ip Man 2, and Bufeng Zhuiying — one could say they assembled the strongest lineup of wuxia and action screenwriters of the past decade.
There were challenges too. Because Biao Ren’s schedule ran longer than expected, it collided with the production of the Black Myth: Wukong animation short “Don’t Listen.” During that stretch out in the wilderness, I could only work with the crew on Biao Ren during the day and return to the lodging at night to give feedback on “Don’t Listen.”
Around the delivery stage, the Black Myth producer called to handle the handover, and the signal in the desert was terrible — one second I’d be mid-conversation, the next I’d disappear; I could only climb to the top of a yardang formation to find a signal. Both sides had extremely demanding tasks — it really was a huge challenge.
03 Animators in the Film Industry
Fei Si: On the subject of media, the process of Biao Ren going from comic to anime to film is also a process of expanding its audience. Compared with anime or comics, film is a stronger medium — more people are involved in the collaboration, more resources are mobilized, and its communication effect is greater.
I think the best path for an individual creator in this era is roughly what’s called IP-ization — taking the work into new media so more people can see it. Of course, games are now an even newer and stronger medium than film, and I also look forward to Biao Ren expanding further into games.
But there are probably things the original creator must accept as well — as the IP grows and more creators join in, the story gradually stops belonging only to the original creator; it produces all kinds of possibilities and, in the end, belongs completely to the audience.
As for how storyboards differ across media: in the animation pipeline, a storyboard absolutely must exist, but a film storyboard can be extremely thorough, or it can be absent altogether. In animation, seeing the storyboard basically lets you picture what the finished film will look like, but a finished live-action film can end up very different from its storyboard.
A live-action film is a torrent of extremely complex information choices. Conditions on set change from moment to moment — every small thing, every small change, the actors’ mental state, even accidents can produce uncontrollable results. The storyboard merely serves as a baseline for communication; as long as the images roughly convey the intent and the key information is accurate, that’s enough. The principal creators are all on set and can exchange ideas directly — there’s no need for the precision and detail of animation drawing.
Also, the trial-and-error function I mentioned earlier is a major difference from animation. Trying every possibility and determining what you don’t want is almost as important as determining what you do want, so the discard rate is much higher than in animation storyboarding.
Fei Si: Mainly storyboarding and concept design. Across live-action cinema around the world, many of the great storyboard artists come from an animation background.
Storyboarding primarily requires the ability to tell stories and the command of audiovisual language; drawing ability isn’t actually the top priority.
Going further, you need a fairly systematic understanding of film shooting — for example, knowing various lens focal lengths, knowing what equipment might be used to shoot what kinds of scenes, and understanding the functions of each department and stage so you can collaborate.
Purely in terms of drawing, storyboards place high demands on perspective. Much of the so-called cinematic feel in a single frame is built through perspective. But after doing it long enough, drawing as a whole isn’t all that important; in the end, it returns to the absolute core: the ability to tell stories.
Of course, communication skills and screenwriting knowledge are also necessary. To design the story’s rhythm, you must have a fairly deep understanding of the script, and share a common context and common tools, in order to establish smooth communication with the screenwriters and the director.
Finally, we pursue a “first-time presentation.” Facing a new project, I don’t want to assemble a scene into a piece of visual work that already exists; I want to create something new as much as possible. How to mobilize all your abilities to present the distinct quality of a momentary flash of inspiration or a stretch of plot through shots — that is what a creator demands of himself.
Fei Si: I think the best way is to take an original screenplay that already has a finished film and, without watching the finished film, draw the entire scene as a storyboard based on the script, then compare it with the finished film. Only by drawing it yourself can you build a genuine feeling for it — you don’t have to confine yourself to copying existing storyboards.
As for working in the field: it relies first on your body of work, second on mature expression, and on professional knowledge as the foundation. In early conversations about collaboration, the other side may not know your abilities yet, but through a shared context they can sense your professionalism, which improves communication efficiency. This factor is invisible but very important.
