New Dream of Red Chambers couple Yang Yang and Jiang Mengjie another wonderful photoshoot together, this time for Valentine’s Day. The two’s new drama, Melody of Youth that co-stars Leo Ku, Eva Huang and Zhou Mi and Heechul of Super Junior, is currently airing on some stations, and will be available legally on youku.com on March 10th.
Poor GQ. While it does have the likes of Chang Chen, Ethan Ruan and Han Han, it has to compete with Esquire‘s September issue, featuring the female cast of Li Shaohong’s Dream of the Red Chamber, pillow fighting. The girls in the photoshoot are Jiang Mengjie, Li Qin, Gao Yang, Li Yan, and Ma Xiaocan. After a 3 years in production, Dream of the Red Chamber finally will air this September. Whether it will be successful remains to be seen, but it’s likely that it will give the majority of its large cast, including these girls, an unparalleled boost in stardom, ushering a new wave of young actors.
Li Qin (Young Xue Baochai), Jiang Mengjie (Lin Daiyu), and Yang Yang (Older Jia Baoyu) in InStyle
Even though there have been many trailers already for The New Dream of the Red Chamber, the previous ones tried to only convey an moody ambiance. This new trailer actually had dialogue, and shows off the beautiful camerawork and sets. The total costs of production for the 50-episode series reached 118 million yuan (for comparison, even the elaborate sets of The Message cost around 50 million yuan), but the producer, sounding much more confident than in previous reports, said that the costs should be definitely recoverable.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3As7GrII1k]
Vid thanks to fountainpark723.
As if they haven’t thrown enough money into this project (50,000 yuan per episode, for 50 episodes) the production behind Li Shaohong’s upcoming Dream of the Red Chamber prepared a water and lights ballet version of the drama that was performed October 3-5 to coincide with the mid-autumn moon festival, in Silver Pickax Lake in Changfeng Park, Shanghai. It featured bursts of lights, water and fire surrounding the actors as they danced above the lake. The show will be performed again for the Shanghai World Expo 2010.
Clip of the part where Baoyu realizes he got tricked into marrying the girl that he doesn’t love. If someone does find the whole thing, please tell me!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFJj-7Z49MU]
L-R Zhu Zixiao, Zhang Han, Zheng Shuang, Yu Haoming, and Wei Chen
Meteor Shower’s theme song was released featuring the voices of all four “Hua”. The soundtrack will feature the lovely voices of Wei Chen and Yu Haoming …and the voices of Zhang Han, Zhu Zixiao and Zheng Shuang. The series will be shown in early August on Hunan TV, after Always Smile! finishes airing.
From L-R Bai Bing, Zhang Di, Jiang Mengjie, Kang Qinzi and Li Qin
These photos feature the very young cast dressed in Versace for the upcoming New Dream of the Red Chamber series, for a piece called “Dreams in Versace” featured in iLook magazine. Those especially invited to participate in this photoshoot were Yang Yang (18 yrs) as Older Baoyu, Yu Xiaotong as Younger Baoyu (14), Li Qin as Young Baochai (18), Bai Bing as Older Baochai (22), and Jiang Mengjie as Lin Daiyu (19). Also in this photoshoot are Zhang Di as Jia Yingchun and Kang Qinzi as She Yue. In blue on the bottom is Yang Mi as Qing Wen, Baoyu’s servant. Below the cut are thumbnails from the rest of this shoot and some of my favorites.