The end of the year is approaching, and the drama market has come to an end. In 2021, the cold winter of the film and television industry is getting warmer, the main theme of the theme is to achieve value leadership and word of mouth is gradually growing" "two-legged walking", the drama production "improve quality and reduce quantity" from the slogan to the mature creative method, the platform and film and television companies enter a period of strategic adjustment for the future.
Under the joint appeal of both ends of the market and users, film and television creation urgently needs to get rid of the old track of catching up with traffic in previous years and speed up into the "content era". The dark horse dramas that have emerged in recent years are precisely the beneficial exploration under the "cold thinking" of the long video platform.
Use small productions to leverage the big market, and exchange new ideas for good reputation. In the series "Red Sea" to break through the success of the "Royal Gift of Small Servants", "Si Teng", "Love is Delicious", "I am very good in other places", "My Babylonian Lover", "To Our Warm Little Time" and other blockbuster masterpieces, not only provide specific and feasible new rules, but also reveal the creators and video platforms "when the fight and long red" of the driving force.
"Royal Gift" word of mouth, the drama is very "delicious", and the dark horse drama drives the market
"Royal Gifts" and "Love Is Delicious" meet all the settings of a dark horse drama, and they deserve to be the hot series discussed throughout the year.
Bone data shows that the first day of the first broadcast of "Royal Gifts" was only a few million, and ten days later, it suddenly ushered in a single-day playback peak of 35 million, and nearly a month later, it won 60 million plays per day; "Love Is Delicious" was also staged outside the venue, with nearly 8 million plays on the first broadcast, and it rose to 60 million in less than ten days. On Douban, the two dramas received 270,000 and 120,000 reviews respectively, with ratings above 8 points.
Compared from the surface, "The Little Servant of the Imperial Gift" and "Love is Delicious" do not have any "quick dafa" to follow, and even cannot find similar items. "Royal Gifts of Small Servants" tells a completely different from the previous sweet pet drama framework of the "suspense + sweet pet" theme, the genius "forensic" and "prosecutor" partners not only bring more freshness to the audience, but also bring a different sense of coolness from suspense and logic. "Love is Delicious" is much more straightforward, under the appearance of light comedy, the main creative team uses themes such as "eating men and women", "timing and heat", "desserts", "turnips and greens have their own love" and other themes to deconstruct the real dilemma faced by the current female group, and stand out in many current group portrait dramas.
Why can "small and beautiful" leverage the "big market"? The answer goes back to the content itself.
Light loading, quality control first, long video creation leap
The "dark horse" that leads the market is not completely dependent on luck and chance, from the previous two years of "Suddenly This Summer" and "To Our Warm Little Time", to this year's "Royal Gifts of Small Works" and "Love is Delicious", it is not difficult to see the confidence and calmness of the dark horse drama "light loading". Taking this year as an example, "The Little Servant of the Imperial Gift" used 36 episodes to tell the earth-shattering case that lasted for 18 years, which was interspersed with countless interlocking small cases, plus the emotional line of the protagonist group and the conspiracy line of the story, and the pace was fast enough to come with "double speed". "Love is Delicious" directly pressed the fast forward button on the group portrait setting of three women and eight men, and many character backgrounds were slowly filled through the way of "point with face", leaving more space for the protagonist's character relationship and emotional interweaving.
With a fast pace to lightly take the market, the dark horse drama has the meaning of "four or two strokes of a thousand pounds", but behind the light clothing and simple behavior, we cannot ignore the ingenuity of the play behind the creators. The original author of "Suddenly This Summer" once wrote in his own essay: "Every time I went to the scene, the director warmly invited me to sit in front of the monitor and consulted me on each one." In addition to the director, the author often communicates closely with the screenwriting, editing, and shooting teams, and finally delivers a film and television expression that is close to the original but full of freshness.
"Love Is Delicious" is more detailed than the former. "Usually whether a drama can retain the audience, the beginning is very important, and then the fourth episode has to work hard." To this end, the main creative team determined the episode arrangement early on, and buried many foreshadowings and contradictions in advance. According to director Chen Zhengdao, for this part of the plot, both groups of directors arrived at the scene to direct, "less than an hour of drama, a total of eight days of shooting, and even some scenes did not have time to finish."
From this point of view, the so-called "small and beautiful" of the dark horse drama is not deliberately grasping small amplification, exquisitely packaging the plot and characters, nor is it blindly sword-to-side, and naturally equating small costs with good reputation. Instead, it is a layer of checks in every aspect of the production, from script creation to on-site shooting, to post-editing, and highlights the creator's ingenuity in a condensed, limited lens language.
It is also by adhering to the ingenuity and original intention behind the creation that the main creative team of many dark horse dramas has realized the construction of the stratosphere at both ends of the transmission, as well as the emotional resonance inside and outside the screen. Douban netizen @ Tang Shuyu described "Royal Gifts of Small Servants" as a "real workplace drama", "Xiao Jinyu is a civil servant leader who is just and upright, and ChuChu is a newcomer to the workplace who works hard to compile". But the workplace they live in is less real: friends are sincere and open, lovers are in touch with each other, and the protagonist group has never been in a real predicament. This allows every "hit worker" in real life after a day of workplace work to get rare emotional compensation and self-satisfaction on the screen, this drama is not realistic, but it can make people have more comfort than reality.
Do a good job in content, respond to emotions, on the basis of grasping quality control, the "small and beautiful" dark horse drama will naturally complete the jump in drama creation, in order to break through innovation and bring story imagination beyond the clichéd plot.
"Love is Delicious" does not portray female labels such as "independent" and "brave" in the female group portrait drama, but starts from the food and collides with the emotional experience with the taste buds; "Royal Gifts" is not the stereotype of "the domineering president falls in love with me", and the element fusion of "suspense + detective + sweet pet" dilutes the sweetness of the previous sweet pet drama and brings unexpected sweetness.
In the final analysis, the dark horse drama is difficult to change and change in creation, not only to ensure that the quality is unchanged, the temperature transmitted to the audience is unchanged, but also to take the initiative to think about change, make a breakthrough in the old model, relationship, structure, and a little more imagination outside the routine, in order to have more good times in the new story.
Rooted in fine products, integrity and innovation, beauty needs to take one more step
Since 2017, multiple themes, including "Suddenly This Summer", "To Our Warm Little Time", "Rumored Chen Qianqian", "Royal Gifts of Small Works", "Love is Delicious", etc., have initially formed tencent video's dark horse content matrix.
The above content does not seek the stability or stacking of the same theme step by step, and its high-quality logic is based on bold attempts and innovations under the premise of ensuring the quality of the content.
According to the "2020 Tencent Video Annual Index Report" from last year, "the level of drama creation has improved, the high-quality drama series has enhanced the user's interest in watching movies, and the peak per capita playback time of Tencent Video TV series in 2020 has increased to 133.9 minutes, an increase of 10% year-on-year", how to ensure that the boutique route is still maintained under the layout of multiple themes, which is a problem that Tencent Video has always been thinking about.
For example, in "Rumored Chen Qianqian", the main creative team did not stick to the rules and set up some habitual character relationships and plots for the series, but constantly reversed and broke the convention. In the team's own words, it is to "extend the possibilities in various settings" to open up new ideas for improving the quality of content. "Love is delicious" that was ridiculed by netizens as "delayed by the title" and "the title is very earthy" has a kernel expression that is not "earthy", and almost every two episodes will have a clear topic of discussion, directly attacking the undisguised pain of reality, and therefore, "Love is Delicious" is called "The Chinese version of "Sex and the City" by many netizens.
For platforms including Tencent Video, the improvement of the overall momentum of the industry does not mean that the pressure is reduced, from beginning to end, creators have never faced cold playback data, but vivid users on the other end of the screen. It is also based on the thinking of this essential relationship that Tencent Video has gradually made many useful explorations on the road of high-quality and innovative, that is, it dares to take a step outside its comfort zone, finds the accurate expression of beauty without rigidity from reality, and discovers the imaginative space of content innovation outside the routine.