Spelling periods, expanding genres, and short dramas with two minutes and one episode are also about to be upgraded

Reporter | Liu Yanqiu

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"For the project of "Renxin", the pre-script planning took nearly two months, and our expectation for "Renxin" is to work slowly and carefully." At the opening ceremony of "Renxin", Yu Ke, the person in charge of the Kuaishou short drama, said so. "Benevolent Heart" is a short drama with medical themes, telling the story of doctor Hui Hui Zhou growing up in the hospital, becoming more humane, and gradually understanding the story of "the benevolent heart of the doctor".

Nowadays, on the short video platform, you can easily brush up on those short dramas adapted from online texts, the length of a single episode is only one or two minutes, and the plot is full of reversals. In 2020, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television added a "network mini-drama" module to the filing system and defined it as a "network drama of no more than 10 minutes per episode". This means that micro-short dramas are included in the industry norms as well as online dramas.

In fact, as early as August 2019, Kuaishou established a "small theater" and officially laid out the short drama business. Last year, with the "This male protagonist is a little cold" and "Qin Ye's little mute" and other short dramas triggered a lot of discussion on Weibo and other social media, in October, Kuaishou announced that it would officially upgrade the "Kuaishou Astral Plan" to "Kuaishou Astral Short Drama", which will provide rights and assistance to short drama creators and institutions through the three directions of content themes, creative support and commercial cooperation. According to the 2021 Q3 financial report released by Kuaishou, the daily active number of short dramas has reached 230 million.

With the expansion of the scale of content, in the summer of 2021, Kuaishou took the lead in proposing the concept of short drama summer slots, focusing on more than 50 short dramas, of which 20 broadcasts exceeded 100 million. This year's winter vacation file, Kuaishou once again concentrated on the launch of a number of starlight short dramas, on January 14, by the "This male protagonist is a little cold" the original team to create a comic adaptation of the short drama "Ten Thousand Slags Chao Phoenix" to open the winter vacation file, this time the film list not only covers ancient style, sweet pet, immortals and other classic themes, but also appeared medical, rural and other realistic themes. For example, Kuaishou and Liu Yexi's behind-the-scenes team Chuangyi Video cooperated in the first medical theme short drama "Renxin", focusing on the doctor's story and the true feelings of the world. On February 2, Kuaishou will also launch the rural revitalization short drama "My Father and My Grandfather", which tells the story of the struggle of three generations of grandfathers and grandchildren who are dedicated to farming, fathers who are keen on sports, and grandchildren who are committed to live broadcasting.

"The short drama ecology has developed to a very mature stage, and we are optimistic about the short drama ecology of Kuaishou, so we decided to lay out Kuaishou short dramas this year." Xie Duosheng, founder of Chuangyi Video, told the interface reporter that Chuangyi Video's Internet celebrities include virtual people Liu Yexi, Hui Hui zhou, non-non-yu and astronaut Xiao Wu.

The reason for choosing such a medical theme as "Benevolent Heart" is first of all because although this kind of theme is not common in the past short dramas, it is a popular theme in the long drama, and secondly, from the creative level, the hospital is not only a place to save lives and help the injured, but also a place to gather sorrow and joy, and there will be many complex emotional stories that occur in the scene of the hospital, which provides a broad creative space for the script. "What we want to do is tell some stories of human warmth through the carrier of the hospital." Xie Duosheng said.

Although the short drama is popular, it has also been labeled as "earthy" and "sweet pet" in the past. In Xie Duosheng's view, at this node in 2022, the big goal of Kuaishou short drama is to do some new content, "we need to lead everyone to see that not all short drama content is sweet pet, it is a domineering president, and more high-quality content can be seen in the short drama track." This coincides with his thinking.

Also online in the winter vacation file is the "Little Sweet Wife 2" produced by Mi Reading. Mi Reading, who entered the game from the internet, is already an old player in the field of short dramas. From April 2020, when she began to do the first drama "Power Pet Diao Fei" to the present, MiYu has produced 51 self-made short dramas, with more than 20 million fans on the whole network and 5.8 billion cumulative plays. The most played drama in the past is the first part of the recently launched "Little Sweet Wife" series, which has reached 560 million views.

Now, Mi-reading is also trying to expand the territory of short dramas to more themes and genres. Lei Ailin, marketing director of Mi-reading content, revealed that the company has laid out 8 vertical traffic matrixes from 2020, in addition to female frequency content, in October last year, together with Kuaishou, made a PV sample of the male frequency novel "Nine Turns of the Stars", and released it first. "Male frequency content heavy special effects, investment costs and sweet pet dramas are not the same day, so we first make a pilot sample, test the feedback of the market, if there is a merchant to come in and then continue to promote, which will help reduce the risk of IP development, in a content that has not yet been verified by the market to achieve a breakthrough." While testing the waters of male frequency short dramas, Mi Yu has recently developed a new project of two dimensions.

Expanding the theme of short dramas has become an industry trend this year. At the recent Tencent Video micro-short drama conference, Tencent Video proposed to broadcast the micro-short drama content in a quarterly manner throughout the year, creating six theme tracks such as comedy season, national style season, interactive season, hero season, suspense season, and blood season.

With the spurt development of short dramas, short dramas, like long dramas and movies, have also had a slot effect. Lei Ailin told the interface reporter that the schedule is very critical to the work. "Why the major platforms will want to seize the traffic of summer slots and winter vacation slots, it is because there will be some relatively large window of opportunities such as college students during the holidays." In addition to "Little Sweet Wife 2", Mi's "Lucky Pregnancy warm marriage" will also be online Kuaishou winter vacation file, and another project currently in preparation also hopes to be launched in the winter vacation file.

Spring Festival file, May Day file, summer file, National Day file... These are the more important peak traffic periods of short dramas, which have a lot to do with the user consumption habits of the entire short video platform. "Everyone uses leisure time to consume, and the core users of young women aged 18-23 have stronger spending power during the summer, so the holiday is the time period we attach the most importance to." The person in charge of the Kuaishou short drama told the interface reporter.

He also said that the platform is fair to each partner, and the long video platform is different, the short video platform can accommodate more content volume at the same time, and there is no "one" to achieve a breakthrough, but there can be a number of blockbusters in the same slot, such as many users in the summer file at the same time in the chase "This male protagonist is a little cold 2", "Little Sweet Wife", "Wearing a book girl with a popularity" and other dramas.