Josh55_anzhi:

Is it just me or do all the actors from season 1 look younger? Especially the emperor and Li Yunrui

Possibly, the production has improved since 2019 nd the lighting effects nd their make up nd such. First of all its been 4 years almost. 

 Arbaz Akhtar:

Possibly, the production has improved since 2019 nd the lighting effects nd their make up nd such. First of all its been 4 years almost. 

Yeah, I guess you're right

Hi all - long time no see. I know it's been a while since I posted the last update (literally 4 months ago) when JOL2 finally began filming. Just haven't posted anything since there were no really big announcements to update you all. Although this is not "new" news - In case you haven't seen it, production company for JOL2 released a trailer you all can watch if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLWICvzE4y8. Please know there are "spoilers" in the trailer since it will reveal a few things we had questions about at the end of JOL1 so watch if you're okay with this.

Also, I can also confirm JOL2 is still filming. I know some thought filming would be done by now but I really doubted that since even JOL1 took 7-8 months to film. They are solely filming JOL2 and no scenes from JOL3. Once they finish filming, then will probably take at least 1 year before it airs given it needs to go through post-production and approval by China's Bureau of Censorship and timing matters a lot. 

Should there be more news that happens, I'll be back. 

Hi! Wanted to let you all know filming for JOL2 has officially ended/completed as of Oct 16, 2023 Beijing time. You can view photos which I have uploaded of celebrations that took place after different actors/actresses  completed their last scenes here: https://mydramalist.com/54083-joy-of-life-season-2/photos

Besides uploading photos of these celebrations, I also uploaded stills of new characters in JOL2 which you can find in the photos gallery

When I get a chance I will also upload photos of actual filming taking place as well as new stills directly of scenes from JOL2 (before post production). Some stills are already in JOL2 Photo Gallery so feel free to look at them. 

In case people have questions, I will address what I think people will ask after reading this post:

  • Production team only filmed scenes for JOL2. No scenes for JOL3 were filmed but there is speculation that JOL3 filming will take place in 2024 but this is unconfirmed. 
  • We don’t know the exact reason why JOL2 and JOL3 were not filmed together given the application for permission to film both was submitted at the same time. However, there was speculation that filming 2 and 3 was separated because a) actors need to have time to rest in between these long periods of filming, b) production needs more time to find locations for filming, set up sets and prepare (since in many ways the scenes in JOL3 are the hardest to film), and c) there may be new characters in JOL3 that haven’t been casted yet and it takes time to do this. 
  • Although there is speculation that JOL2 will come out by next summer this is highly unlikely because even after JOL1 was finished with filming, it wasn’t until 1 year and a few (2 or 3) months later that JOL1 aired. Thus, we would be lucky if JOL2 aired by next year this time but more realistically should expect it to happen in 2025 (hopefully early or mid year).

That’s all I got for now. When I get the chance I’ll upload more photos! See you at the next update. 

Hello! Okay - I've finished uploading stills from JOL2 along with stills of them filming and behind the scenes photos. Feel free to check out the "photos" section for them. 

 sjadvocate:

Hello! Okay - I've finished uploading stills from JOL2 along with stills of them filming and behind the scenes photos. Feel free to check out the "photos" section for them. 

Thank you for your efforts sj

Thank you for the updates! Really looking forward to JOL2!

I’m glad they didn’t change some of my favorite actor/actress 

 Heaven4ever:

I’m glad they didn’t change some of my favorite actor/actress 

Me too. Looking forward to S2?

 Pytheos:

Me too. Looking forward to S2?

I was very happy when xin zhi Lei was recasted would have been so sad if someone else played it 

Yes she’s one of my favorite, I’ve rewatched her scenes with Fan Xian so many time

Who is Li Hong Cheng?

That's insane that this drama has finished filming, but production and editting will take 1 year + several months to complete. Like, how is it possible editing and NON-acting functions take longer than the actual film? 

It's actually the norm for post-production to take a much longer time to complete than the actual shooting. Most of the things we see in a single shot are actually perfected in the post-production phase. Besides editing the clips together, there are also lots of things to key out such as the wires, and lots of backgrounds to add in on the green screen. Just keying out the wires for a single episode may even take weeks since the characters fly around a lot.

Then besides the technical stuff like color correcting and adding special effects to the video, there is also the dubbing part which sound editors will need to edit so that the audio is clean. But before the sound editors can do that, the actors need to do the dubbing first. And just like filming, the audio recording process is the fast part. Editing audio is super time-consuming as well. After a long process of editing, they gotta add the clean dubbing to the edited episodes. Oh, and not to forget music and sound effects.

And then there's more. Since C-dramas often come with hard subs, that means they gotta burn those subtitles into the episodes once the videos have been edited along with the audio . They can probably skip the transcription process since the final script needs to be ready for actors to do dubbing. I'm not sure if they use some AI software to autogenerate the subtitles, but even if they do, there's bound to be errors. So they might do quality control and manually edit the spelling errors or out-of-sync timecodes. But compared to video and audio editing, hard-coding the Chinese subtitles probably takes the least amount of time among the three.

What I've covered is probably less than half the things they need to work on in post-production. Pretty sure there is a lot more technical stuff involved in each editing stage. But this is as far as my knowledge goes so I'm afraid I can't share more about the rest.