The author | Gu Han
Editor| Li Chunhui
As many pessimistic people who are pessimistic about the "metacosm" think, the market is really suffering from no new concepts for a long time, and it will catch a simulated sheep to be energetic, and this year's content market is the same. The long drama genre is relatively solidified, and the concept of interactive drama in the early two years has initially proved to be a pseudo-outlet.
The short video finally supported the micro-short drama, but the "sweet and refreshing" gameplay seems to only maximize and condense the long drama. As for the new content form, is it that everyone has no money to send a press release? I always feel that less and less new wind blows into my ears.
Compared with long content, short content that strengthens the effect of information cocooning is really hidden deeply. But the change of media is unstoppable. Today, you can say that you resisted the temptation of vibrato and kuaishou and never downloaded it. But this does not mean that it can really cut off the short video, after all, other apps in the mobile phone have surrendered early. In the same way, for fragmented entertainment and fragmented audiences, practitioners must sooner or later change their mentality and pay attention to it.
Through a wave of explosive bombing, now we have a preliminary impression of micro-short dramas: sweet and refreshing, slaps, online adaptations, internet celebrity awkward performances, and now we are still thinking about paying. And those unpopular species that have not yet had time to make their own explosive models, I don't know whether they have the opportunity to become famous in one fell swoop, or whether they will germinate themselves or even die out on their own in an acre and three points of land.
Quadratic and black technology
Compared with live-action film and television dramas with a single episode of forty minutes, animation is a kind of short content. Nowadays, there are many two-dimensional creators who devote themselves to short videos and compete for fragmented time.
Dynamic comics, as the name suggests, make comics move and enrich their audiovisual, but they are shorter and cheaper than real animations. In 2015, dynamic comics received the attention of the industry and capital for the first time in China, and vertical players such as Burning Culture, Jitter Culture, and JitterMan Studio were born, and then returned to niche and low-key development.
Webcomics have risen through the mobile Internet outlet, and after the emergence of short videos, tencent animation, quick look and other head platforms are keenly aware of its advantages.
Quick Look Comics entered Douyin in 2017, using PV in the form of dynamic comics to drain traffic. In 2019, Tencent Animation released the "Cartoon Animation" adaptation plan, which will be converted into its popular works in batches and distributed through QQ watchpoints, micro-vision, yoo videos and other products. In 2021, quick-look comics will be upgraded to "quick-looking", and it is necessary to use the new product of "comic drama" with 3-minute vertical screen to promote the comic industry into the video era.
In the past, dynamic comics acted as part of IP incubation. Microvision's "Psychic Princess" has undergone a two-level jump between dynamic comics and formal animation between the original comic and the live-action shorts. However, for a platform such as Kuaikan that aims at a two-dimensional community, "comic drama" itself is a core content that can free users' hands, bring freshness, and keep users for a longer time.
Similarly, in The Ecology of Bilibili (Main Site - Bilibili Comics - Cat Ears FM), this kind of content is called "sound comics" or "dynamic comics" that are divided into radio dramas, and the production is already quite sophisticated, and many of them are paid content.
Left: Look fast, right: Bilibili comics
At the same time, there are also many two-dimensional content on the two main short video platforms of Douyin and Kuaishou.
Self-made animation using game-making tools is an important branch of fandom. Large-scale online games such as Sword Net III, Tianya Mingyue Dao, and Reverse Water Cold have launched official game editors, which is convenient for players to become choreographers and create.
In the past, this behavior was more like generating electricity for love or entertaining oneself among relatives and friends. But on Douyin Kuaishou, this type of game animation short drama has captured the hearts of ancient style lovers and has been able to monetize in the same mode as live-action shorts. At present, MCN has signed the person, and the whole is moving towards formalization and industrialization (does not mean that the copyright risk is completely eliminated).
"Great Song Ying Painting" is a counter-water cold editor
In addition to these game shorts from UGC to PGC, there are also professional MCNs that create two-dimensional IP on short videos like incubating live influencers – or virtual idols in the popular concept. In a statistic in December 2020, there are already many anime accounts with tens of millions of fans, embarked on the road of receiving advertising monetization, and are worth a lot.
Dayu Animation's "One Zen Little Monk" has released nearly 600 videos since entering Douyin, which was previously categorized by theme, and began to try serial short dramas in October this year.
The virtual idol new top stream Liu Yexi debuted through a short story video. 2 minutes with a plot, a character, the accuracy is comparable to the movie, and it successfully helps it start the first shot. According to reports, the Chuangyi video behind it is an MCN that started with post-special effects production, and the team currently has about 150 people, more than half of whom are post-production technicians, and a considerable number of them have experience in film and television companies.
Before Yoo Ye-hee's "virtual beauty master" positioning, there was also a prefix of "can catch demons". It is not difficult to see that the team will enrich its personality by serializing "short video blockbusters" in the future. It is not difficult to imagine that this "roll king" will not only roll up beauty and virtual idol tracks.
There are good actors in the short videos
The content form has its own birth and death dates, but the storytelling runs through the entire history of mankind. Before having such and such black technology, the most basic form of human storytelling was word of mouth, with analogy, narrative and imitation.
From video connection to live broadcast and short video, the scene and form of video have never been so free and casual, and shooting video has also changed from having a certain equipment or technical threshold to everyone's daily behavior. In a way, humans are pulled back into a state of "face-to-face" communication. A very common type of short video is a single-person direct-view camera performance or broadcast copywriting.
Correspondingly, a group of drama bloggers who focus on one person playing multiple roles in the short video (of course, there is also the hidden traffic password of men and women). Some of them will symbolically change costumes according to different characters, switch scenes, or speed up the pace through post-production, and some will be more simplified on this basis, from beginning to end. The once-popular "Zhong Meimei" rarely holds the one-shot that professional actors are struggling to find to the end, and the rhythm is excellent.
In the early stages, these bloggers mostly perform fragmented segments. But the audience will always remember a few fixed characters after watching for a long time, and there will be a fulcrum of the brain supplement story.
Blogger "Ma Xiaoma" has serialized a campus drama on the short video platform, with 8-9 characters played by one person, all of which are "typical characters" that may appear in a class - naughty scum, well-behaved class flowers, lively women and so on.
Watching the episode, the tone is relaxed. The whole chase can sort out the undercurrents and intertwined complex emotional lines. The ending of the male protagonist empathy and farewell love made many viewers even more uncomfortable, and even engaged in fandom.
Another blogger's video of "Zuo Fengqin's Happy Life" belongs to the kind of extreme form. There is editing and acceleration, but there is only one fixed camera position in the whole process, and an actor appears in a role - a sharp and caring middle-aged female doctor in the northeast "Zuo Fengqin", who only relies on lines and reactions to take the audience away from the plot.
The most widely disseminated section is Huang Jiali's story. In the plot, she is the daughter of Zuo Fengqin's friend Wu Li, who came to the hospital alone at a young age, because her parents' preference for sons and daughters has been dragging on the consultation fee, and finally died on the operating table, which is very regrettable.
To some extent, the "Zuo Fengqin" explained from another angle why micro-short dramas can grow up and get the likes of more than just the sinking market audience. Human fireworks, bittersweet at the bottom, careful speculation on typical characters in life - rather than stereotypical distortions oriented by hot searches. These are all things that domestic dramas have owned and lost, and they can occasionally reproduce through the casualness and rudeness of short videos.
Use your phone to open desktop movies and TV
A few days ago, a semi-ridiculous and half-serious saying was popular on the Internet: even if you die, you must also leave a breath to destroy the mobile phone, and you must avoid the tragic end of death and "social death".
The convenience of technology makes us more and more inseparable from various electronic devices, and consciously or unconsciously keep too many experiences, relationships, moods, and secrets in it. Nowadays, couples often take "whether they can look at each other's mobile phones" as an important intimacy examination and three-view review standard (it is also a new issue on the Internet that can set off an online debate in three or five hours), and the drama of the mobile phone desktop has completely crushed the "business trip home early" of the previous generation.
This kind of online privacy has also brought new ideas to film and television creators, and "desktop film and television" came into being. That is, the audience watches the operator open various files, web pages or communicate with others throughout the process, so as to continuously unlock information and promote the plot, such a kind of "matryoshka" film. Or, in the simplest terms, the feeling of watching the recorded screen.
Desktop film and television can be traced back to the 2013 American horror film "Lair". But the real official name and large-scale attention to the report will not wait until "Network Mystery Trail" and "Unfriend 2: Dark Web" become popular in 2018.
The former was introduced to domestic release at the end of 2018 and only earned 30 million at the box office. On the one hand, there were already high-definition video sources on the Internet at that time. On the other hand, perhaps this form is not compatible with the big screen, so that the audience sits in the seat and watches the computer screen for nearly two hours, which is a bit too exaggerated. Including in foreign countries, there have been no similar hits since 2018.
Until the arrival of the epidemic, the isolation of the home has prompted some creators to open their minds and use the restrictions of this condition to create content.
In 2020, the British BBC launched a 6-episode comedy "Staged", which tells the story of the director and actors affected by the epidemic and having to rehearse online, but the work at home and the interference are endless. The format of the series is Lian Mai, everyone starred in the real name, and there is a sense of reality similar to reality TV.
In 2021, Apple TV+ in the United States launched an atypical radio drama with a science fiction theme, "Calls", the content is to call, and then use a variety of sound wave visualization effects to set off the atmosphere. The episodes of both shows are about 15 minutes long.
The first domestic desktop film and television appeared in 2020, which is a suspense web drama "Cloud" created by Lao Suan, the director of the 2018 unpopular word-of-mouth drama "Madhouse". There are 16 episodes in both seasons, and coincidentally, the single episode is also about 15 minutes.
The drama did not attract much attention at the time, in addition to the small cost of no big coffee and other conventional factors, hard candy Jun boldly asserted: in China, where the penetration rate of mobile phones exceeds that of computers, computer desktops are far less resonant than mobile desktops. Computers are for work, mobile phones are all about life. There is no need for any fancy settings, losing the mobile phone, the mobile phone is unlocked by others to look over, for everyone is just thinking about it with its own horror effect.
It may be that the hard candy Jun is not involved enough, and the first mobile desktop short drama noted so far is "What's Daniel Zhang" on NetEase LOFTER, which tells the story between high school student Daniel Zhang and his male god when they are at the same table. The form is basically WeChat group chat and voice call, but the packaging is more fancy after the later period.
As for why this innovative drama form appears on LOFTER, it is not surprising. Using a simple tool (in fact, it is WeChat) to fake character dialogue and circle of friends, "picking up mobile phone literature" is a popular form of fandom creation. Simplicity is rudimentary, but it is better than realism. Doesn't the mainstream gossip market also circulate some WeChat dialogue peach rumors from time to time? Dozens of pages of chat history, at this time is not too tired of words. That allows the chat history to scroll up on its own, and the graphics become short dramas.
Short videos are the most popular carriers at present, and new content is also around them, or they can be regarded as micro-short dramas. Micro-short dramas are in the ascendant, is the soil is a tide, to be defined by practitioners in all links in the future. If we have to accept short content, then we hope that there will be more innovative gameplay based on the characteristics of short videos, and we will not repeat the mistakes of long dramas too early.