For suspense dramas,
Therefore, it is not possible to make a mistake,
Gimmick hunting is not advisable.
The author | Perlie
Edit | win-alone
Operational |
The suspense drama "Gold Rush", starring Liao Fan and Chen Feiyu, finally began broadcasting on January 18, 2022 after the twists and turns of fixing and withdrawing the file, which was also the first drama of the Mist Theater in 22 years. The drama is adapted from Lai'er's novel "1986 Gold Rush", according to the premiere feedback, "Gold Rush" performed well in terms of word of mouth.
Source: Douban
There are not a few suspense dramas adapted from novels, and there are successful works that must also have overturned works, and what is more, the tragedy of the overturning even triggered the dissatisfaction and accusations of the original author.
"In the future, either the copyright will not be sold, or the contract will be written in the contract that the author has the right to edit and review the script."
This is a sentence spoken by the author of the online article Tailfish in the Weibo accompanying picture on November 18, 2021. Because the copyright buyer did not adopt the opinions of the original author, but indiscriminately changed and injected water into the plot of the original work, Tailfish, as the original author, decided not to give the original author the right to edit and review in the future, otherwise the copyright of the work would not be sold.
Image source: Weibo
As soon as the remarks came out, there was an uproar.
What everyone noticed was another sentence in the tail fish text: "It is difficult for one of them to say that the script has been revised, and the other one has said that it is going to start." ”
This "to boot" work naturally attracted everyone's attention, and then netizens pulled out that this work was "Seven Roots of Murder".
The drama started on December 22 last year in a low-key manner, and changed the title to "Seven Roots of Fan Jane", and the simple boot ceremony was complained about by many netizens at that time.
Image source: Network
Three days after the start-up, on December 25, writer Tail Fish announced that he had recovered the film and television rights of "Seven Roots of Murder", and the filming of the series was also suspended.
The project is suspended, but the public discussion will not be stopped.
The film and television of "Seven Roots of Murder" once carried full expectations, but even if there was no tail fish later, after the film and television team lineup came out, it also disappointed netizens.
According to public information, the director of "Seven Roots of Mystery" is Yang Miao, and entering his name in the Douban group or Weibo can see a lot of "resistance" voices.
The reason is that there is no him, who let Yang Miao previously direct two suspense dramas "Very Witnessed" and "Fatal Wishes", but the label of "Seven Roots of Mystery" is still suspenseful.
Director Yang Miao, who is also?
Tracing Yang Miao's past experience, he is considered to be a director of "halfway out of the house".
Graduated from the Literature Department of beijing film academy, he is not a professional director with a scientific background. For a long time after graduation, Yang Miao has been engaged in work closely related to her major, such as screenwriting and literary planning.
In film and television projects such as "Sui Dynasty Visitor" and "Foggy", Yang Miao can be seen as a "screenwriter". It was not until 2012, when he began to contact and direct micro-films, that he began to embark on the road of film and television directing.
The micro-film was the existence of "thunder and small rain" at that time, and Yang Miao, as a graduate of Nortel, naturally would not be satisfied and stopped here. In addition to producing projects, he actively participated in various venture capital activities and young directors support programs at that time.
In 2013, he met Five Hundred (founder of Five Yuan Culture) on the Youku Young Directors Support Program, which can be said to be a turning point in his career as a director.
Five hundred (left), Yang Miao (right) Source: Network
At that time, Wubai was preparing to shoot its first suspenseful reasoning web drama "Psychological Crime", and then the popularity of "Psychological Crime" also prompted Wubai to establish the "Arc Alliance", which is an organization that gathers new talents in the film and television industry in the eyes of 500. In order to ensure the creativity of the members of the "Arc Alliance", Five Hundred set up a company "Five Yuan Culture" to solve the support of marketing, production and other aspects for the projects of the Arc Light Alliance.
Yang Miao is the main member since the inception of the "Arc Light Alliance".
In 2016, Yang Miao co-directed the suspense web drama "Crime Fighter" with Wubai. The play is the first work after the establishment of the Arc Light Alliance, and from this we can see the push of five hundred pairs of Yang Miao.
"The Exterminator", which uses Benge's reasoning as a gimmick, is Yang Miao's directorial debut, and the drama's rating of 6.5 on Douban is not good for newcomer directors, but it is not eye-catching. Various problems in the work, such as the rigidity of the acting skills, the bugs of the plot, and the confusion of Chinese and Korean bilingualism, have caused many viewers to criticize.
Perhaps because of the poor response of "The Exterminator", Yang Miao was slightly frustrated, and in the following two years he returned to his old line of screenwriting, and successively participated in the screenwriting of the web drama "River God" and the movie "Big" People.
Until 19 years, Yang Miao returned to the ranks of directors with the movie "Deadly Machine", but the box office of 319,000 and the bad reviews of netizens also show that his return this time is not successful.
Source: Taobao tickets
Then, Yang Miao successively directed and filmed the suspense dramas "Very Witness" and "Fatal Wish", and the two dramas here were also broadcast on the Mist Theater in 20 and 21 respectively.
Although these two dramas have invited powerful actors Song Yang and Yuan Wenkang and the new generation of actors Fan Chengcheng and Wen Qi to join the team, they are not satisfactory in terms of word-of-mouth feedback or broadcast performance.
Today, "Seven Roots of Mystery" is in a shelved situation, and we can't know the next work arrangement of director Yang Miao. However, if he wants to go long on the road of directing, he still has to rely on high-quality works. The quality of his future works is debatable, but judging from his past works, the expectation space given to the audience and the market is very limited.
Data interpretation of the works of director Yang Miao,
What's the problem?
The evaluation of "Very Witness" and "Fatal Wish" is not an empty nonsense, and after comparing its rating and playback with other episodes of the Mist Theater, the difference between high and low is clear at a glance.
In a horizontal comparison with all the already broadcast dramas of the Mist Theater, these two "Extraordinary Sightings" and "Fatal Wishes" by director Yang Miao are the lowest in terms of word-of-mouth and broadcast volume.
Judging from the Douban score, as of January 17, 2022, the 4.2 and 5.4 points of "Fatal Wish" and "Very Witnessed" have not passed. Compared with his 6.5-point "Crime Fighter" in 16 years, director Yang Miao can be described as going farther and farther on the road of regression.
The originality is weak, the plot is hard and hurt, and it is the fatal injury of the low score.
For suspense works, logical reasoning and rigorous and complete stories are the foothold and foundation of the work. Once the plot and logic are flawed, it is like a fish losing water, and the whole work cannot be established without roots. The narrative techniques and atmospheric rendering that serve the plot are also reduced to overhead tricks after leaving the foothold, no matter how wonderful, but only offline kites, suspension and excess.
Taking "Fatal Wish" as an example, the volume of its 12-episode short drama is very limited in time capacity, so this is also a disguised requirement that the branch plot must serve the main line plot as a task, otherwise the main line plot will be easily scattered by the side plot.
Image source: iQiyi
Director Yang Miao wants to create a story line for each character in the production: the intermittent insertion of news interviews over a thousand mountains, the story line of Xi Lei and Luo Yiduo that suddenly appears, the confusion of Wang Meifen and Qiu Wendong's entanglement... How can the audience jump back and forth on a plot with great contrasts but weak connections, forced to accept blunt abrupt turns and characters offline, and how can they be immersed in a deliberate sense of suspense? It is good that the director has ambitions, but unfortunately the ability has not kept up.
In the case that the director does not see the advantages and disadvantages of the suspenseful short drama, the blind challenge will only trigger the audience's disgust, making the whole drama seem to have been taking care of him all the time, and the branch line is intermittently the main line is fragmented, so it can be described as a chicken feather.
Yang Miao's deliberate piling of elements and making things up is the second major damage to his works.
"Extraordinary Witness" is about the re-detection of the ancient suspense case, while "Fatal Wish" is put on the shell of soft science fiction, telling the domino butterfly effect caused by the witcher app.
The story is not enough, the characters come together; the suspense is lacking, and the editing is saved, which can be said to be the common disease of most domestic suspense dramas at present.
"Very Witness" took six episodes of time, giving enough love drama between the heroine and her boyfriend without explaining the background and progress of the unsolved case, how can this not surprise the audience? The characters like Zhou Sheng in the play hurriedly went up and down the line, which did not promote the effective development of the plot, and such invalid characters are not in the minority in "Very Witnessed".
"Fatal Wish" plays a soft sci-fi gimmick but outputs a waste shot that lags behind the sense of science and technology of the times, the sudden failure of the elevator without warning, the absence of a teacher or security personnel in the face of danger, the ability to rely on power generation but train dogs in order to steal electricity, and so on, how can it not break the audience's belief in watching the show?
Such a meaningless and contentless and hard-wired suspense drama will only cause the audience to resent and complain.
Judging from the data of Yunhe, the effective playback of these two works is still the bottom two. Specifically, the effective playback of the main film of "Fatal Wish" is currently the lowest in the Mist Theater, only a fraction of "Who is the Murderer", which is a month later than it is. The penultimate "Very Witnessed" has only half the total number of views of "Octagonal Pavilion Mystery Fog" that began broadcasting in 2021 a year after its launch.
From the perspective of daily broadcasting and weekly broadcasting during the broadcast period, according to the statistics of Yunhe, "Fatal Wish" and "Extraordinary Witness" did not enter the weekly top 10 during the broadcast period. Fatal Wishes is at no. 9 on the daily charts, while "Extraordinary Sightings" is only 16th.
Image source: Cloud-converged data
In the view of the number of entertainment jun, in order to objectively evaluate the quality of the episodes and the broadcast performance, the rating is a reference, and the amount of broadcast is objective support.
The third dilemma of Yang Miao's work is that he compresses the story capacity in order to pursue a sense of atmosphere.
The atmospheric rendering that does not help the story is just a pavilion suspended in the air, which at first glance looks like a look, but inside it is a mess, which is also a common problem in most works today.
In "Fatal Wishes", aerial shots, long shots, etc. are used to lay out the cyberpunk dystopian tones in the play; and the concept of "poetic suspense" played by "Very Witness" relieves the shaking and shredding of its shots, but it cannot make up for its narrative delays and plot flaws.
For suspenseful works, the rendering of the sense of atmosphere is the icing on the cake but should never be the foothold.
Such an inversion of the cart before the horse, how to hatch the fine products?
In terms of public opinion, both dramas performed mediocrely in market feedback during the broadcast. The popularity value of "Very Witnessed" during the broadcast period has never entered the top 30 of the full public opinion heat list; while the popularity value of "Fatal Wish" has declined all the way after the start of the broadcast a week ago, and it has not attracted attention in the market until the end.
Most of the audience's feedback is reflected in the bullet screen and comments, according to Yunhe data, taking "Fatal Wish" as an example, the number of bullet screens mentioning "plot" ranks first, and the audience's disgust for shaking the camera and regret for the cast can also be glimpsed from it.
The cast of Yang Miao's plays is still remarkable. But because he did not fully cooperate with the actors, the high-quality actors did not add color to the work.
I don't know when, suspense dramas have become the first choice for the gilded acting skills of traffic actors.
However, as a drama category with absolutely high requirements for acting, although the producers are happy to choose them because of the traffic attributes of the traffic actors, they will never bet on them desperately. After all, the current calming market and the increasingly demanding audience for quality are not as confused as in previous years.
The partner of the new generation of traffic + drama bone strength is the casting mode of most suspense dramas in the past two years. Such as Zhang Yi + Wang Junkai in "Rebirth", Wang Qianyuan + Lu Han in "In the End", Fan Chengcheng + Shao Bing in "Fatal Wish", Yang Rong, etc.
For the new generation of actors who are not from the class, they are unable to quickly and accurately give the response required by the role due to their lack of experience. At this time, the director's own understanding of the script and the ability to control and dispatch the scene are crucial, and the director combs the emotions by telling the actors about the play and guides the actors to constantly find the feeling of the role in the walk, which is also the most testing place for the director's ability.
And Yang Miao is obviously not strong in this regard, whether it is the powerful actors Song Yang and Yuan Wenkang in "Very Witnessed", or the new generation of actors Fan Chengcheng and Wen Qi in "Fatal Wish", the charm of the actor and the arc of the role have not been captured by the director.
Director Yang Miao's spirit of efforts for the original script is worthy of recognition, and his problems are also a common problem of domestic suspense dramas at present. The scattering of the story, the blurring of the characters' movements, and the failure of the film's presentation effect are indeed things that the director himself should review and ponder.
The fire of "The Hidden Corner" and "The Silent Truth" in 20 years has made many production teams blindly follow the trend, so that the market for suspense dramas in 21 years is in the market in the quantity, but in the quality of the door. Whether in terms of popularity or word of mouth, the suspense works of 21 years are far less successful than 20 years.
Judging from the 22-year film list released by various platforms, the number of suspense dramas still occupies 12.16% of the 22-year drama market with 45 films. Compared with mass production, the audience prefers to see good content that passes the quality and has something to say, rather than a flawed and indiscriminate work.
For the suspense dramas that have been broadcast for 22 years, how many can really be recognized by the audience and remembered by the market? This also needs to wait for the series to be officially broadcast online, and then handed over to the audience to choose and evaluate. For director Yang Miao, he also needs a masterpiece to prove himself to the market and the audience.
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