Original: Fork less
There was a time when all video portals had a "micro-movie" channel. Even wedding companies across the country have begun to launch private customized micro-film business. Young directors from the grassroots also like to make micro-films as the first threshold for entering the industry.
Just a few years later, no one seems to talk about micro-movies anymore. Young people pick up their phones at the dinner table to watch short videos from 15 seconds to one minute. Short videos are easy, entertaining, and entertaining. Life is already so hard that people don't have any more time to be profound.
A short video platform launched an original image contest on the whole network in an attempt to reawaken the original power of netizens, but at the award ceremony, almost all the awards were dog blood sub-dramas.
In the era of carrying strips, China's original images seem to have ushered in the darkest moment.
And where are the creators who once created brilliance?
This article is slightly longer, it is recommended to collect it first and then look at it
In the summer of 2004, Lu Zhengyu, a sophomore majoring in multimedia information at Hunan University of Technology, did a crazy thing. He and a few classmates used a digital camera with a memory card of only 64M and could only shoot 5 minutes of material at a time, and remade the movie "Infernal Affairs" in its entirety.
The remake here refers to the real remake: except for the scene and the camera, which appear rough and immature, each shot and camera position are no different from the original. In the eyes of digital gamers at the time, this was the act of a madman.
< the shooting scene of the digital camera film "Infinity" >
Lu Zhengyu uploaded his "Infinity" to the "Three Glasses of Water DV Culture Network", and the film quickly spread on the BBS forums of major universities, triggering a large number of netizens to pursue, and was also called "the strongest remake in history" by Sina Network.
"Three Glasses of Water" is the first website in China that focuses on DV culture sharing and exchange. Many college students who love to make short films put their works on the "three glasses of water" for netizens to download and watch.
Chinese Internet in 2004, and there was no concept of a video portal. With the improvement of technology, China's broadband users have exceeded 10 million, and P2P software and resource sharing websites for downloading movies and MP3 have emerged. At that time, Lu Zhengyu did not know that the Internet tide was carrying countless opportunities.
In China in 2004, only a few people saw such an opportunity.
This year, Wang Wei, president of Bertelsmann Book Club China, has been a social elite in foreign companies for three years, living an ideal life in the eyes of others. But he felt that life at the moment was not exciting.
In October 2004, Wang Wei and his Dutch friend Mark Van der Ezys went to play golf outside Shanghai. On the way back, Mark asked Wang Wei, "Have you ever heard of Podcast?" ”
Mark turned on the computer and asked Wang Wei to see the channel he subscribed to.
In July 2004, MTV host Adam Curry founded the world's first online podcast channel: Daily Source Code. Two weeks ago, he and software engineer David Winter combined RSS (Simple Information Aggregation) with audio to develop a small piece of software called ipodder.
With ipodder, users can subscribe to audio on the Internet and download the latest broadcasts to their iPods to listen to at any time. The format quickly became popular on a small scale on the Internet, and Mark was one of the subscribers.
Wang Wei was attracted by this fresh form of subscription and has been obsessed with it for more than two months. He realized that on the Internet, every podcast is an listener, and every listener can also be a podcast.
"If you have this disease: you can't sleep all night because of an idea, you mistakenly put the fork in the cup instead of the plate when you eat, and you talk like an excited parrot to someone who wants to listen to your thoughts, or you have kept a secret for too long to hide." Well, this is the best time. Timing is determined by your heart. ”
Soon, Wang Wei proposed to Mark: Let's develop this thing in China as well.
< Wang Wei >
At first they just wanted to make a Chinese version similar to ipodder, but soon Wang Wei found that ipodder was just a subscription tool, the content source was still from the website server, and ordinary users could not build a website by themselves. So he thought that he could combine the model of the photo sharing site Flickr to create a video streaming website.
At the time, this was a groundbreaking concept, and YouTube, which would later lead the way, had not yet been created. It wasn't until a year later that Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw the viability of the concept of podcasting and added Podcast Directory to the epoch-making version of iTunes 4.9.
At the end of winter, Wang Wei left Bertelsmann. He found five college students who were willing to accept a monthly salary of $100, rented a 3-bedroom and 1-hall private house in a neighborhood near the Shanghai Gymnasium, and began his entrepreneurial career.
Wang Wei said that it felt like taking a bamboo spear naked, holding a small flag that no one knew, and rushing into the battlefield of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
Dreaming of this thing, although distant and illusory, always has infinite charm, attracting wave after wave of young people to go alone.
In Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 24-year-old Yang Yu, a 24-year-old graduate of West China Medical University (the director of "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending"), also made a crazy decision.
When he was in high school and college, Yang Yu had carefully planned his future. After repeated measurements, he felt that the first priority after graduating from college was to have a job where he could eat. Because his parents had both worked in hospitals, he did not hesitate to study medicine when he filled out the volunteer form.
But after really starting four years of medical university life, Yang Yu never felt real happiness. He always felt that there was a nameless fire burning in his heart, but he couldn't say what it was.
Until one day, Yang Yu and his classmates inadvertently visited several companies that do CG animation in the back of the school canteen, and looked at the peers sitting in front of the computer in the cubicle room doing animation, Yang Yu suddenly found the fire that had been burning in his heart. It was the impulse to watch Dragon Ball as a child, watch Naruto when I grew up, and I couldn't help but copy these classic anime, and the joy of being appreciated by teachers and classmates in the classroom... That was his original dream.
< In 2002, Yang Yu (Dumplings) painted >
It turned out that his creative enthusiasm had not been extinguished, but he had been imprisoned by reality. Like a pig willing to stay in a pigsty suddenly finds out, it can eat enough outside.
Yang Yu immediately began to investigate the market and prospects of the CG industry, and after watching a circle of mediocre works, he strengthened his heart to do CG.
At this time, Yang Yu, who had just been a sophomore, was not even familiar with computers, let alone CG animations. "But how to say it, in fact, what kind of CG works you can make is not only seen when you learn CG, this is the so-called confidence." That bamboo has long existed in your heart, maybe you used to draw bamboo with pencils, brushes to draw bamboo, pens to draw bamboo, but now you have to change to keyboards and mice. ”
After two and a half years of self-studying maya software at school, Yang Yu successfully found a job with an original animation work: going to an advertising agency in Chengdu to take charge of animation creatives. The job was busy and fulfilling, adding a lot of practical experience to him.
In the CG circle, if you want to mix well, either by relationship or by work. Yang Yu carefully weighed his connections and found that he could only take the second way. However, in an advertising agency, it is difficult to make a work that meets your heart every day to cope with the various needs of customers every day.
After many ideological struggles, Yang Yu decided to resign from the advertising agency and concentrate on making an animation work that really belonged to him.
"It just so happens that my creative desire has been suppressed for many years, dammit, open-minded, just let me cool it at once."
The savings of working for more than a year were quickly finished by Yang Yushuang. His father died while he was just working, and the family's source of income was only his mother's 1,000 yuan a month retirement salary, of which 700 yuan was also used to pay the mortgage. The daily life of the mother and son can only be handled by the remaining 300 yuan.
But her mother still chose to support Yang Yu's dream without hesitation. Just like in "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", the Lady Li who was kicked by Nezha countless times for the sake of her son's moments of happiness.
In the three and a half long years that followed, Yang Yu would live with loneliness in his home in Chengdu, eating discounted food from the supermarket with his mother, and fighting a hard battle for the work of his dreams.
In 2005, China's Internet entered the era of home broadband from dial-up Internet access, with more than 100 million Internet users accessing the Internet, becoming the second largest Internet country after the United States. Tianya, Maopu, Renren, Douban, and the subsequent Tieba began to occupy and lead the community culture of the Chinese Internet.
This year, Wang Wei's Tudou network was officially launched.
After the first version was completed, Wang Wei experienced all the community functions in one night, and finally concluded: garbage. So all the designs were overturned and redone.
In the early morning of April 15, 2005, Wang Wei finally looked at the yellow potato mask on the screen and the tear-dripping flower on its face, patted the engineer's shoulder: Publish it. Fuck I've paid the $800 press release fee and can't get a refund.
The emergence of Tudou has opened the door to a new world for the majority of video enthusiasts. Initially, Tudou could only get 5 audio clips a day, and by 2007, there were 5 million registered users, 33 million visitors to independent IDs, and more than 30,000 programs uploaded in one day. The content involves many fields such as talk shows, original or cover songs, and DV short videos taken by netizens.
The rapid development of the Internet has brought a new context, and grassroots and kuso cultures have begun to grow savagely in the sea of bits.
At a time when people were frantically voting for the "super girl" Li Yuchun, a group called "Houshe Boys" quietly rose on the Internet. The group of two school students became the hottest Internet celebrity of the year by uploading videos of their fake singing and funny ideas on Tudou.
< The boy in the back house >
In December 2005, Chen Kaige's movie "Wuji" was released, and Hu Ge, a tudou netizen, spent 80 yuan to buy movie tickets to go to the theater to watch.
After 121 minutes, Hu ge walked out of the movie theater and felt that he had lost money, and the movie was not worth the 80 yuan ticket price. He spent 4 days writing the script, 5 days of production, a person wrote and directed and dubbed, and produced a spoof video "A Bloody Case Caused by a Steamed Bun", which was posted on Tudou.
In this 20-minute short film, he uses the movies "Wuji", "China Rule of Law Report" and the video of the shanghai circus city performance as the material, re-edited and processed, and does his best to prank and give "Wuji" a new story. After the release of the video, it immediately triggered the netizens' desire to complain about the movie, and spread throughout the network at a viral speed, triggering a wave of "spoofs" on the Internet.
On July 12, 2006, the podcast "Young Master Cat" uploaded a short film "Chinese Team Wins the World Cup" edited and produced by himself on Tudou. This parody of "Separation in October" had more than 4.5 million hits on Tudou alone, breaking the record held by "A Bloody Case Caused by a Steamed Bun" and becoming the highest-clicked online video that year.
The demand for online video from Chinese netizens was ignited almost overnight, tudou network in two years to raise two rounds of funds, the team expanded from the initial five college students to 150 people, the office also moved from a three-room hall near the Shanghai WantiGuan into the South Suzhou Road Tudou warehouse.
< 2007 Tudou birthday >
Video websites such as Cool 6 Network, Excitement Network, and Youku Network have appeared, and Cool 6 Network has even created an entrepreneurial myth of "13-day financing". In 2006, at least 150 video sites were announced.
Major video websites began to spend money to rob excellent originals, and a video website even took out a gold brick worth more than 200,000 yuan to reward outstanding original talents.
Wang Wei said that we seem to have glimpsed the beginning of the era of Internet video.
In 2006, Lu Zhengyu's second kung fu short film "Master" won awards in several college student video competitions, and print media and television media rushed to interview him, making him a celebrity in the school.
< Short Film "Master" >
At the award ceremony of the Beijing University Student Film Festival, Lu Zhengyu said: Thank you to my idol, Mr. Stephen Chow, who made me love movies so much. In the next film, I will no longer be "amateur".
This year, like all college students facing graduation, Lu Zhengyu was full of confusion about the future, struggling with whether he should stick to his dreams or go with the flow and find a job that could support him.
At the end of the year, coinciding with the preparation of idol Stephen Chow for the release of the new film, Lu Zhengyu, as a star fan, took the time to go to Beijing and participated in the Chow Sing Chi Challenge Carnival.
That day, he imitated Zhou Xingchi on the stage, and Zhou Xingchi was very happy to watch offstage. Although Xingye didn't know who the guy on the stage who was trying to imitate himself was, Lu Zhengyu still wrote a blog excitedly, with the title "Zhou Xingchi Applauds Me".
< Lu Zhengyu won the third prize in the short film section of the Beijing University Student Film Festival >
The power from the idol is like a flame, burning Lu Zhengyu's fiery dream. In the summer of his senior year, in order to escape the pain of finding a job and realize his dream of a movie, he decided to go crazy again - to make a feature film.
Lu Zhengyu found a friend to borrow a Panasonic DV, and found Xiong Chen, a college classmate who had worked with "Master", and the two of them worked as producers, directors and cameras to start shooting the DV movie "Mo Xiaobai's Diary of a Water Monster".
< Stills of "Mo Xiaobai's Diary of a Water Monster" >
This time the production of a new upgrade, coupled with the group performance, the number of crew members for the first time exceeded twenty people. With the help of his parents, he found an investment for the film in advance. Because of Lu Zhengyu's popularity on the Internet, Anhui Television also arranged two reporters to follow the interview.
Before filming began, the crew conducted a small actor audition in the local primary school quite formally. In order to reflect the film's cinematic feeling, they also specially welded a simple rocker arm with iron frames and pulleys.
< Lu Zhengyu is operating a homemade rocker arm >
After more than 20 days of pre-filming and more than two months of post-production, "Mo Xiaobai's Diary of a Water Monster" was officially completed. The film achieved a good reputation in the "China Independent Film University Tour" that year, and won the "Best Feature Film Award" in the 14th Beijing University Student Film Festival Short Film Competition.
At this time, visual times, the company that helped to do online distribution for the film, threw an olive branch to Lu Zhengyu and invited him to Beijing to work as a director. Lu Zhengyu officially began his career in North Drift.
From 2006 to 2007, the visual era made the first few mobile web dramas. But in the 2.5G era when the mobile phone network speed is not too fast, this game is too advanced, several network dramas have not obtained too good benefits, and later the company had to take over some promotional films and commercials in order to survive.
In those days, he commuted to work on time every day, numbly holding DV, shooting cheap pictures with his colleagues, feeling that he and his original dream were gradually drifting away.
In 2007, after filming the last advertising micro-film "Return to Glory" for the company, Lu Zhengyu officially resigned.
It was his darkest hour in Beijing, with no income, little future, and nothing but a passion for movies and a girlfriend who fought alongside him. The only spiritual pillar is the indomitable little characters in Star Ye's works.
When the wave of online video swept through most of China, Yi Xiaoxing, a supervising engineer at Luqiao Company, keenly saw the opportunity.
During the day, he carried hundreds of thousands of tools on the construction site to make measurements, but on the Internet, he was a well-known celebrity of cat poker network "stupid daddy little star".
< Call the beast Yi Xiaoxing >
One day when he came home from work, he suddenly had the idea to make a game commentary video. He picked up the A4 paper in his hand, drew a head portrait of himself, changed the screen name to "Call the Beast Easy Little Star", and used the camera that came with the computer to shoot the "Call the Beast Series" in the rental house that will be famous for the history of online videos in the future.
From 2007 to 2009, Xiaoxing was the hottest online video blogger on the Chinese Internet. He produced more than two dozen spoof videos in succession, averaging more than a million views per video. At that time, with the advertising income on the video, I could earn five or six hundred thousand a year.
In 2007, Xiao Yang, a cutting-edge director who was already well-known in the advertising industry, received a demo of an adapted Japanese song sent by an old client Wang Taili and asked him if he was interested in making a MV.
Both of them are veteran users of cat poker, deeply feel the popularity of online video, and have always wanted to play with tickets, so they hit it off and formed a "chopstick brother" on the dinner table.
After the first video of the Chopstick Brothers, "Bless Your Dearest", was launched on major video websites, it received tens of millions of hits within a week, and won awards such as the Sina Podcast Awards, becoming the most popular online video in 2007.
The prize money and prizes of the sina podcast contest are worth a total of 100,000 yuan, and afterwards a reporter interviewed Xiao Yang and Wang Taili: What is it like to get a 100,000 yuan prize. The two laughed bitterly, the money spent before and after this film has been more than 100,000, and there are many friends who volunteer to help without asking for money.
< Chopsticks Brothers >
Through this ticket play, the Chopstick Brothers received the attention of the brand side, and soon someone came to cooperate and expressed their willingness to invest in their next work. So the two hit the iron while it was hot, and filmed the MV "Where Are You", but they did not expect that after the release of the video, the stone sank into the sea, and basically did not get any sound.
"The investment is too big, and if there is no reasonable profit model, it is estimated that it will not be done again in the future." The plan to make money with the MV basically failed, Xiao Yang and Wang Taili were depressed for a while, hid their Internet celebrity dreams, and returned to their respective lives.
In 2007, Lu Zhengyu registered for "fish studio" with the help of his girlfriend Guo Guo and officially began to work alone.
His war micro-film "Return to Glory" set a record of 8 million hits 10 days after it was launched on Tudou.
After "Return to Glory" was fired, Lu Zhengyu's advertising shoot was booming. By making commercial micro-films, his annual income exceeded one million, and he successfully bought a car and a house in Beijing.
In 2008, Zhou Xingchi's new film "Yangtze River Seven" entered the publicity period, and Zhou Xingchi's support association wanted to shoot a short film for the film and found Lu Zhengyu.
As a die-hard fan of Star Ye, Lu Zhengyu was ordered to urgently find friends to borrow equipment, actors and venues a week before the event began, and finally completed a short film called "Our Story" in three days.
Later, Zhou Xingchi took Xu Jiao to "Lu Yu Has a Date", and the program team played this short film. In that episode, Lu Zhengyu handed his prepared portfolio to Zhou Xingchi with an excited heart and a pair of trembling hands. Out of respect for Star Ye, he didn't even leave his contact information on the portfolio.
Stephen Chow praised his film, saying: "He shot very well, thank him." ”
"Afterwards, someone told me not to take the praise too seriously, it is all the program process. I don't care, I have to believe it's true. ”
< Lu Zhengyu and Zhou Xingchi > on the set of "Journey to the West"
What Lu Zhengyu did not expect was that Zhou Xingchi really remembered this fledgling little director that day. 3 years later, Zhou Xingchi was preparing to shoot "Journey to the West to Descend the Devil", and suddenly saw Lu Zhengyu's name in a pile of actor profiles, instantly recalling this young man who left a deep impression on him at that time, so he specially invited Lu Zhengyu to the set to help as a screenwriting assistant.
By the time of 2016's "Mermaid", Lu Zhengyu was involved in the starring and co-screenwriting of the film.
Many years later, Wang Wei will definitely think back to the spring and summer of 2008 again.
On April 26, 2008, in an abandoned church in Deqing, Zhejiang Province, the first Moganshan Film Festival hosted by Tudou was launched.
The scene is very simple, but everyone is very excited. More than a hundred young people from all over the world, because of an Internet podcast platform, gathered together, for the first time because of the original image to enjoy their own glory.
"Everyone is the director of life, and everyone can make their own film. Hopefully, many of China's future well-known directors will be born here, and when they achieve more, they will find that the first film festival award they won was at the Tudou Film Festival. ”
The following year, Wang Wei officially renamed the "Moganshan Film Festival" to the "Potato Image Festival". And it was fixed as the Tudou annual event, which aims to tap into Chinese original videos with high-level creators. For a long time after that, the Potato Image Festival became a gathering for newcomer video creators.
At this time, Youku also gradually grew. Mr. Koo formally proposed a "fast is king" strategy, which helped Youku become Tudou's main rival in later years and, together with Tudou, became China's highest-traffic video site.
Youku launched two plans, one is the "Cattle Man Plan" that focuses on the UGC model, which launches the grassroots star-making campaign of shooter users, and the other is the "hot theater" of learning from the American video website HULU, which is later regarded as the beginning of the copyright war on Chinese video websites.
In 2008, director Lu Zhengyu received a cooperation invitation from Youku and Tudou at the same time.
Youku's Lu Fanxi approached Master Kang and persuaded them to shoot lu Zhengyu's online advertising drama "Office Hip Hop Quartet". In this mini-network drama, Lu Zhengyu's comedic talent was fully displayed, and after the broadcast of "Hip Hop Quartet", it once again created a miracle in the history of Internet video, becoming the first network drama with more than 100 million views.
Tudou network and HP computer produced the online movie "A Dog's College Time" directed by Lu Zhengyu, and the famous Internet Fat (Qian Zhijun) and Xue Zhiqian, who debuted a few years ago, starred in this movie.
< Network Chubby >
When the movie was promoted, Yi Xiaoxing, who was also a signed creator of Youku, waved the flag for Lu Zhengyu's film on Weibo. Lu Zhengyu's success allowed Beast Yi Xiaoxing to see the future he wanted, and a director's dream began to take root in his heart.
If I had to set a specific time for the golden age of Internet video in China, it would have to be 2010.
In 2010, Xiao Yang and Wang Taili received an invitation from Youku and others to jointly sponsor the "11 Degrees Youth Series Micro-film". They put down their work, raised more than 100,000 funds, and began to shoot the micro-film "Old Boy".
Later, everyone knew that the chopstick brothers' "Old Boy" touched the entire Internet that summer. Wang Taili's sentence "Dreams are always out of reach, should we give up" made countless middle-aged people who compromised with reality burst into tears.
< > "Old Boys"
This year's Potato Image Festival, the number of original entries collected was as high as 5585, more than the previous two editions combined. "Fight, hit a big watermelon", "My name is MT", "Internet Addiction War", "Li Xianji's Adventures" and other animation works that swept the whole network in 2009 have won awards, and domestic animation has ushered in a highlight moment.
Director Li Yang's animated short film "The Adventures of Li Xianji", which took two and a half years to create, won the best animated short film award that year, and has been regarded by netizens as a masterpiece of domestic original animation.
This short film was subsequently invested by China Film and launched a live-action version of theatrical film adaptation plan. The main actor is Jackie Chan's son Fang Zuming, Li Yang is responsible for the director of the animation part, and the director of the live-action part is Guo Fan, who later made "The Wandering Earth".
The short film "Hit, Hit a Big Watermelon" won the Berlin Film Festival's "Special Jury Prize" and became the only winning work from China in 2010, directed by Yang Yu (Dumplings). The short film was produced over a period of three years and eight months.
After "Hit a Big Watermelon" won a circle of awards around the world, Yang Yu wrote this text at an online sharing meeting:
First of all, I want to thank my parents, because they are the best parents in the world, without their open-mindedness, I could not easily change careers, without the selfless support of my parents, I could not not let go of my dreams, bend my waist for five buckets of rice, without the meticulous care of my mother's life, I could not devote myself to the production of short films.
I would also like to thank those pioneers who have succeeded by doing three or four years of personal short films, you have opened up new channels in the vast ocean, you are the beacon of my spiritual world, and the difficulties I have had along the way are not worth mentioning in comparison with the pain of your arduous exploration of the way.
After winning the award, Yang Yu got many cooperation opportunities. He set up the Dumpling Animation Studio, hoping to do a few more animations that he could do.
In 2010, a major game company approached Dumpling Studios in the hope of collaborating on an animated film. Yang Yu spent several months writing the script, which was unanimously praised by the industry, and as a result, at the juncture of the preparation for production, the investor's personnel changed and the project was aborted.
The first cannon did not start, and everyone basically lost a year of youth, but Yang Yu felt that he had accumulated valuable practical combat experience and lessons, which was not a loss. During that time, in order to maintain the operation of the company, Dumpling Animation took over many commercial projects, and most of Yang Yu's energy was basically consumed in management. In the day-to-day outsourcing projects, the dumpling studio gradually faded from the public eye.
In 2013, The Studio tried to launch its second work, "The Boss's Woman", and although the number of hits reached 6 million in a week after the release of the short film, the reputation of this short film plummeted, and it was called Yang Yu's worst work by fans.
At this time, Yang Yu no longer had a sense of crisis of survival, and the "nameless fire" that had been burning in his heart when he was in college was running again.
In 2015, Yi Qiao of Caitiaowu Pictures approached Yang Yu and asked him if he would like to spend three or five years to make an animated movie. The condition is that you don't do the messy outsourcing anymore.
Yang Yu did not reply immediately. A few months later, Yi Qiao received a PPT and a brief reply from Yang Yu: I want to do it - Nezha.
In 2010, after the online video platform underwent a round of reshuffle, there were basically only two giants left, Tudou.com and Youku. Tudou.com and Youku have each invested heavily in the purchase of copyrights, and Internet videos have gradually changed from UGC (user-produced content) at the beginning to PGC (professionally produced content) world.
On the eve of Tudou's IPO, Wang Wei's ex-wife Yang Lei wrote a letter of property division, which stranded Tudou's listing plan for nearly a year. In the end, the famous divorce case ended in compensation of $7 million for the woman.
Calling Beast Yi Xiaoxing left the construction site where he worked for seven years, together with Fan Jun and Bai Zhongchun, who left tudou, he established Wanhe Tianyi Company in Beijing, recruited Liu Xunzimo, Bai Ke, Xiao Ai and other talents, and officially started his entrepreneurial career.
In 2012, the micro-film debut "Invisible Girlfriend" called Beast Yi Xiaoxing was broadcast on Tudou. The micro-film "OmuraGu", created for Ma Yinglong, won the Golden Peng Award at the China International New Media Short Film Festival that year.
Youku and Lu Zhengyu filmed three micro-films "Wedding Photos", "Peerless Master" and "UFO Witness", and then produced the phenomenon-level network drama "Wanhe Tianyi" with Wanhe Tianyi.
On August 17, 2011, Tudou was finally listed on the NASDAQ in the United States, but Wang Wei was already exhausted. At this time, Youku has led Tudou by more than one position.
< Potato online listing, Internet big V sent blessings >
"Tanabata night, seven years of potatoes, officially retired tonight." Thank you to each brother and sister, and thank you to everyone who passed by on the road for a touch of color in the story... See you in the next fun dream. ”
On August 24, 2012, Wang Wei wrote such a paragraph on Weibo, announcing his official retirement from Tudou. In the same year, Youku Tudou announced a merger.
After leaving Tudou, Wang Wei started his second dream and founded a company called Chasing Light Animation, determined to be Pixar in China. Wang Wei said that it is impossible to catch up with it, but a limited life still needs to do some remarkable works.
In the following years, the Potato Image Festival became bigger and bigger, and the figure of Tudou Network gradually blurred. In 2014, Yang Weidong took over Tudou.
This video site, which once led the trend of a generation of original images, has declined.
In 2013, shortly after the establishment of Light Chasing Animation, Wang Wei was invited to give a lecture at the National University of Singapore. At the end of his speech, he sent his blessings to the group of young and fearless young people in the audience: we are creators, dreamers. I wish you all, while we can still dream and live in dreams, do our best to have interesting dreams and live interesting dreams.
In the past six years, Chasing Light Animation has produced three animations that Wang Wei deeply participated in creating, "Little Door God", "A Tang Adventure" and "Cat and Peach Blossom Garden", and failed at the box office three times in succession. In 2019, the only one that achieved word-of-mouth and box office counterattacks, "The Origin of the White Snake", is still Wang Wei's work of retiring to the second line as a producer.
On the road to becoming China's Pixar, Wang Wei is still on his own.
In 2019, Yang Yu's five-year animated film "The Devil Boy of Nezha" was released, creating the highest box office record for Chinese animated films. Yang Yu became the only director among the winners of the Potato Image Festival that year who successfully broke through.
Others are still moving silently on the path of sticking to their dreams.
In 2015, the theatrical film "Never Expected" directed by Beast Yi Xiaoxing was released, and although the box office earned several hundred million, the reputation suffered a cliff-like collapse. Yi Xiaoxing was once known as a "circle money director".
He lost 35 pounds, went from being a fat man to a thin man, and decided to start all over again.
In 2017, Lu Zhengyu's film "Peerless Master" was released, which was criticized by netizens for being outdated and imitating poorly, which is the texture of the network movie.
Today, Lu Zhengyu has remade web dramas and is still struggling to explore his own comedy path.
Li Yang, the director who produced the domestic animation god work "The Adventures of Li Xianji", has not been heard from, some people have seen him shoot weddings, and some people say that he is still dead from the movie "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", which was established a few years ago.
< Stills from the movie "The Adventures of Li Xianji" >
From 2004 to 2019, fifteen years have passed. In the past fifteen years, many viewers have watched this group of grassroots creators who started from the Internet, step by step from the small screen to the big screen. Watch them brilliant, succeed, and then fail. Like our lives, we are full of ups and downs.
But what is valuable is that this group of people have found the road they want to take most for the rest of their lives in their stumbling lives. And Wang Wei's inadvertently written Tudou network slogan, "Everyone is the director of life", seems to have become a portrayal of each of them.
What is the path you want to take most for the rest of your life? This is a question That Wang Wei once asked himself.
In September 2010, Wang Wei traveled to Sydney on a business trip and met Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, at a dinner party. Standing next to the Mexican tycoon with a drink, he suddenly realized that the world's richest man bore some resemblance to his favorite writer, Naipaul.
"If Naipaul and Carlos Slim stand together, if you had a choice, who would you want to be?" Wang Wei silently asked himself in his heart, and silently gave the answer.
"I know, every time, I choose to try to be Naipaul."
Resources:
[1] Keso, Fragments of Memories of Tudou and Gary
[2] Chi Yude, "Let Others Play With Capital, He's Going to Engage in Literature and Art," Chinese Merchants Hall of Fame
[3] Zhou Xin and Li Zhigang, "The Secret Of Never Expected", 100 People in the New Economy
[4] Li Xiao, "Interpreting Wang Wei's Director "Potato" The Man", Tencent Technology
[5] Lu Zhengyu: Fish Who Loves Kung Fu, Sina DV Character Show
[6] Chai Shanshan, Huang Yujiao, and Zhang Wenqiang, "Research on the DV Creation System of College Students in the Internet Age", Film Review
[7] The young people who grow potatoes
[8] Dreams Are Better Than Bread CG "Naked Runner" Dumplings Abandon Medicine from "Wen" Animation Road, Martian Age
[9] Ma Li Lingshan, "Video Self-Made, Let Yi Xiaoxing Have So Many "Never Expected", Going Downstream
[10] Wang Wenhua, "Research on DV Phenomenon in China and Exploration of DV Creation Tendency in Colleges and Universities"
[11] Dong Lu, "Wang Wei, A Poet's Business Journey," Zhizu GQ
[12] Wang Wei, founder of Tudou.com: The Online Adventures of Literary Youth
[13] "The Potato Image Festival that won the red "Beast Easy Little Star" is suspended", PingWest played
[14] Wang Wei, those things that "potatoes" in those years
[15] Wang Wei, "Potato Three Years Old"
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