From K-pop singer to full-fledged actress
Most people know Victoria Song as the sole Chinese member of SM Entertainment's K-pop girl group f(x).
With the release of TV series Ice Fantasy, the 29-year-old Qingdao native can now add full-fledged actress to her resume.
The big-budget 62-parter period drama, which premieres on Sept 5 at 9pm on cHK (Singtel TV Ch 510), features Song in the main role of fearless, powerful sorceress Li Luo.
Li Luo is forced to leave the love of her life, Prince Ka Suo (Feng Shaofeng), due to their social class disparity - she is a lowly commoner and he, of royal birth.
In an e-mail interview with The New Paper, Song, whose previous acting credits include Chinese dramas When Love Walked In (2012) and Beautiful Secret (2015), talks about the challenges of working with CGI...
Your character Li Luo has several fight scenes. Was that tough for you?
Since this is my first martial arts TV drama, it's all very new and refreshing. It's the first time I've done so much wire work. To me, all these are valuable experiences.
Ice Fantasy was filmed in Beijing and Inner Mongolia, but there's also a lot of CGI involved.
Yes, one example would be my unicorn's horn. In the drama, my unicorn is a tall, white, handsome horse with a CGI horn. So sometimes, when I'm standing in front of my horse, the "horn" would be poking at my head and our director would exclaim "Li Luo, your head is being poked by the horn".
Other times, I'd walk right into the horn and the CGI would be in my face. Our director would then shout "Li Luo, you are interfering with the CGI, don't stand there!" Funny things do happen with CGI.
Do you have to use your imagination for those scenes?
I would ask our directors lots of questions like "Where is the exact location of the CGI object? Where am I flying to?" They'd give me a direction or a rough guideline and I'd act it out according to their imagination.
Which were the most difficult and memorable scenes in Ice Fantasy?
There was a particularly difficult scene where Li Luo was cursed. As a result, she became a totally different person. The sudden change in personality was a huge challenge for me, as it was the first time I was trying something like that. During the shoot, our director and Feng Shaofeng gave me plenty of advice and told me how I should act.
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