In recent years, the drama industry has undergone many new changes: new themes have alternately become the trend, new faces appear on the screen, and new genres such as short dramas and interactive dramas are constantly emerging.
As industry watchers who have been documenting these changes, we are excited about all the new changes, even if they are small, and hope to converge into a whole new era. Now and in the future, we are and will continue to be on the lookout for those who are making a difference to the drama industry.
This is the background for the birth of our "New Drama Artists" series, and we pay attention to them because they are "practitioners" who are really on the front line of the industry, and can complement our identity as "observers", they tell and we convey. Then, jointly promote the solution of problems and the deduction of changes.
In the first part of this series, we invited Bai Yiqing, the founder and producer of Linghe Culture.
Since serving as the chief producer of "The Darker" in 2014, Bai Yiqian has been active on the front line of drama work, almost throughout the entire era of online dramas. The "new" label on Bai Yiqing's body is not in experience, but in the works, from "Imperial Gift" and "Final Note" to "The Three-Body Problem" broadcast at the beginning of the year, almost every drama represents some kind of new path to success.
The broadcast of the sci-fi drama "The Three-Body Problem" has made "film and television industrialization" mentioned again in the industry, which is also the relatively "narrow" cut of our chat this time. Behind the beautiful blueprint, only front-line practitioners can feel how far we are from industrialization, and what specific problems we still have that need to be solved.
This is the first article in the Poison Eye [New Drama Man] series.
The following is the conversation between Poison Eyes and Bai Yiqing:
Industrialization, still far from it
Poison Eyes: When we talked about "The Three-Body Problem" last time, your point of view was that "the industrialization of Chinese film and television has not yet been fully systematized", so after completing a relatively large project such as "The Three-Body Problem", have you gained anything new in terms of project process or production management?
Bai Yiqing: "The Three-Body Problem" is a relatively special project, it cannot be regarded as a play, because the style of each part is quite different, and it can be regarded as several plays. For our production team, it is mainly the part that tests management and connection. But because we ourselves have accumulated a lot of experience in the process, although the workload is large, it does not cause much trouble.
"The Three-Body Problem" stills
It is certainly good for the team's experience, but from the perspective of industrialization, the improvement of process management or industrial system construction is minimal. Because most of the work of "The Three-Body Problem", including the setting of special scenes, the coordination of suppliers, etc., there are very few parts that can be reused into other projects.
Poison Eyes: About two years ago, when the Yunshang production system was first launched, you mentioned some very small problems in the actual work of the crew, such as meal waste, etc., have these problems improved significantly in recent years?
Bai Yiqing: Frankly speaking, it's quite a lot. Because the system needs to be constantly improved, new problems will be found in use, and then the version will be corrected. An obvious problem is that there are too few samples, and our more "extensive" state of drama still exists.
The filming scene of "The Three-Body Problem"
Poison Eyes: So it is a seemingly clear management process, and there will be many specific problems in the process of landing, and the real scale and efficiency of the industry still require a lot of running-in work.
Bai Yiqing: That's right. From the point of view of business management, it is good, but crew management cannot be equated with it. Many times, we don't take into account the large number of unexpected situations that can occur in the actual work. This is not a problem for one crew, but for the entire industry.
When we are struggling to solve these things, we no longer have the energy to do real process management.
Poison Eyes: We have heard from other producers and directors that the redundancy of the crew is now more serious, and the drama of similar size is now much more manpower than it was needed a few years ago, so the corresponding cost will also become higher. What causes this?
"The Three-Body Problem" crew
Bai Yiqing: I'm also very sad about this. About a month or two ago, when I was talking to a friend, I happened to talk about this problem. In recent years, I feel inexplicably more weird jobs that we have not heard of before, such as mobile groups. What may have been done by one person before is now broken down into four or five people.
I understand that there are two reasons for this. The first is that there is a big problem in the basic training of personnel, and there are fewer people who can take on multiple tasks in one job.
In fact, there is a lot of training for actors, directors and screenwriters in the industry, but the training of grassroots posts is too bad. The training of grassroots posts is currently a process of a master leading apprentices, and now there are more projects, there are fewer children who can endure hardships, and the income is low, and the masters may not be able to help, so they will be disassembled and taught. The comprehensive basic position talents in the past are gone.
The second is the very real problem of income. For the boss of each department, he brings 10 people into the group and brings 20 people into the group, his income is definitely different, for example, if a person reports a salary of 10,000, he draws two thousand, and 10 people will definitely not be as much as 20 people. In the past, we could solve this problem by increasing the income of the bosses, in other words, I gave him this matter, and he would find enough for as many people as he could find on his own. But now because the requirements are specific to people, this problem is difficult to avoid.
Poison Eyes: Now the basic work of many crews still follows a more quack-and-lake model, right? For example, there are also the kind of "lighting group in one village" reported by the media, which is very different from college training.
Bai Yiqing: Colleges and universities will train so-called high-level professional talents, but colleges and universities will never cultivate basic talents, such as training photography assistants and lighting assistants, and there is no such "Lanxiang Technical School". So they can only rely on the eldest brother to take them, and the eldest brother is of course a village to bring people.
Our company has wanted to do a producer system for so many years, just to get rid of this model, to turn the master-apprentice inheritance into a process-based inheritance, so that a person can quickly and systematically master the ability to work, instead of the master telling you that this thing is shelved here, that thing is shelved, the master himself does not know why it is put like this, but his master said, "This is what my master taught me".
Poison Eyes: If the "Lanxiang Technical School" that cultivates the basic work of the crew is possible, who will take the lead in doing it?
Bai Yiqing: Actually, I have talked to several directors and producer friends about this demand, and everyone has this idea. But this thing is really painful to do, because it takes up a lot of energy and invests a lot, but the effect is very little, because the demand is too small, and the employment area is actually not so wide.
Poison Eyes: The industry has been advocating "cost reduction and efficiency increase" for a while, and has it fallen into front-line work, has there been any obvious improvement?
Bai Yiqing: Frankly speaking, very often, because the current situation is caused by environmental factors. If we go back to 2014, you will find that the production cost of TV series at that time was very different from now, it was cheap at that time, and it is expensive now.
I was particularly impressed by the fact that at the forum of the 2015 Shanghai TV Festival, the host asked a question, saying do you think the price list of TV dramas in the future will reach 5 million? I was on stage at the time, and the other people were very senior industry bigwigs, and we said "impossible" in unison, and I said: "I don't know how to spend 5 million if you give me." ”
Now, in the past five or six years, everyone has found that 5 million is not enough. Actor's salary aside, because the price of the entire basic configuration has increased a lot, and this part of the price cannot be lowered. It is not that the actor's salary can be solved from 100 million to tens of millions, but from 120 to 105. For example, in the past, group performances may have been 60 yuan, now it is 80 yuan, 100 yuan, how do you say this money will fall?
Poison Eyes: The basic price equivalent to the basic type of work has risen as a whole, and the increase in each part is not large, but it will accumulate a large cost.
Bai Yiqing: Yes, in previous years, I stayed in Hengdian, dozens of yuan a day, and then the rich crew passed, and the hotel said that it was full, and they gave more money, saying "100 a day for us to stay", and the price was raised little by little, and now it is almost 200 yuan a day. Do you bring the hotel back to 60 a day, people will? All prices are like this, not a sentence of cost reduction and efficiency can be reduced.
Poison Eyes: If we refer to some of the more mature film and television industrialization systems, the root cause of this problem is that we cannot establish labor unions and unified standards, such as stipulating that all hotels in the country must be at this price, and something like this.
Bai Yiqing: Two reasons. The first is that there are no unions in our country, because unions can keep everyone in lockstep, and those who violate the rules will be excluded, so no one dares to violate them.
A simple comparison is to transfer the now lowered actor's salary to the vast production system, there are hundreds of thousands of people, and they are not paid millions, but thousands of dollars.
At this time, can you say to them, "Sorry, I cut you 1,000 yuan a month"? People say, "I'm not playing with you, I'm going to do something else." Now the scenery staff is like this, the price you give is too low, they stop and go to the furniture factory.
Second, in fact, it is difficult for the platform itself to negotiate as a representative, which platform can not go to Hengdian to say "I will film how much your house price will give me, otherwise I will not come", everyone can not do this, people say you love to come or not, anyway, there are many projects, it doesn't matter if there are few. So no one can break this game, and the water level of the overall price is stuck here.
Poison Eyes: Is it possible for several platforms to do a combination?
Bai Yiqing: Not very realistic. Unless there is an extremely conventional guild or institution to do it. When I first entered the industry a few years ago, there used to be a screenwriting organization in this industry, and everyone carried the price together, and they did not accept it below this price. That organization united dozens of screenwriters who were more representative of the industry at that time, and I was among them.
I asked the organizer a soul torture question, if someone else just gives me a lower price than this, do I do it or not? The other party thought for a long time and told me, you have to insist on saying or not doing. I said I didn't believe it.
Later, sure enough, many screenwriters went out to talk to people, all saying "if you bypass the organization list to find me, I will give you how much cheaper for one episode", without others to lower the price, they put the price down.
"A lot of people have misconceptions about the work of producers"
Poison Eyes: I've heard some stories before, producers and directors will have some disputes during the filming process because of different positions, you are a screenwriter, will this help you better understand the thinking of content creators?
Bai Yiqing: I personally have experienced the transformation from creator to producer, and I think that many people may have misunderstandings about the work of producers, and think that producers are in charge of money and production.
I don't think so, our company has always adopted a "producer-centric production led by the screenwriter and deeply involved by the director", and the producer-centric system is characterized by the producer having the highest decision-making power, I don't know if it is the same as other companies, but we have always been in this direction.
So we will ask all producers not to start the preparation work after getting the script, our work starts from the incubation, generally the early incubation cycle is more than one year or two years, when the director joins the project, in fact, a lot of things in the early stage have been done.
Poison Eyes: So "The Three-Body Problem" is also such a process, and a lot of tonal-setting work has been done in the early stage.
Bai Yiqing: Well, before Yang Lei joined, we had been working for four years, including art, concept design, etc., and there were already seven or eight thousand pictures. After he joined, it did not mean that it was filmed immediately, everyone discussed it together, and he could adjust it according to his opinion. But at the core, when a show begins to prepare, it is the producer who sets the tone and quality control.
I know that there are many companies that give the preliminary work to the director, but the advantage of our process is that the upfront time is relatively less urgent, the quality can be relatively high, and for the director, it can also save them a lot of time and energy.
Poison Eyes: In other words, the producer will be deeply involved in all aspects including the content.
Bai Yiqing: Yes, we require the producer to have the ability to shoot even if the director arrives the day before the start of the film. Of course, this is an extreme setting, which means that you have to make sure that all the preliminary preparations are foolproof.
It's not that the director is not important, the director is very important, but in today's environment, it is unrealistic for a director to spend a long time doing the preparatory work in the early stage. So "The Three-Body Problem" is a special case, because the later stage is relatively long, coupled with the epidemic, and Yang Lei is also willing to devote himself to this project. But most of the time you can't lock a director into a project for years, and that's not reasonable.
Therefore, under our production system, it is required that any problem in any link of a crew can be restored very quickly, which is a good production system.
Poison Eyes: It is equivalent to the premise that the production process is well established, and each link has room to be adjusted.
Bai Yiqing: First of all, no matter which main creator in the crew needs to be replaced, it means that there is a problem in management; However, how short a time you can replace without affecting the production of the crew does represent how high the level of production management is.
Your process needs to be very granular so that once another team comes in, it only takes a short time to complete all the connections. Being able to see all the progress of the project in one system and what to do next. It's also something we're after.
Poison Eyes: What is the current situation of this production system you mentioned?
Bai Yiqing: It's still a non-online state. At that time, we worked with Ali to do Yunshang production, the original intention was to make a professional-grade industry software, users are the producers of each project, they can grasp all the information dynamics of the crew, manage all the details, and the feedback chain is extremely short.
Our goal is to use this system to control all the internal feedback produced by the crew in less than one minute, in other words, the producer can know all the information about the crew in one minute.
At present, we are reorganizing all the nodes ourselves and adjusting them according to our needs. But this is a very long and painful process, and I don't know if it will be made one day.
Poison Eyes: Is it possible that the domestic drama industry will develop into a "blocky industrial ecology" in the future? Like you're doing, each studio or platform has a relatively reasonable process at its own pace?
Bai Yiqing: Objectively, the road is still very long. Because it is still quite expensive for companies to raise a group of employees, not every company can do this. Of course, our company is because I myself am more "willful", generally speaking, such a system can only be reduced if the whole industry is in use. At present, we definitely can't do that level, and we can only hope that after this set of things is fully done, it can be used within the industry.
The things we are currently developing are also modular, and each company can customize according to its own requirements, for example, I have 100 functions, corresponding to 100 different detail management, which can be personalized. Even every project within our company cannot use exactly the same system.
Poison Eye: Are you working with other companies now?
Bai Yiqing: My own company has not used it, and we only have a few modules in the early stage, such as script disassembly, evaluation, material selection, and so on. We also have a system for selecting actors, which has not yet been enabled, that is, everyone's records of actor feedback, summarized to form a comprehensive evaluation, to prevent someone from messing with the crew, or maliciously blocking actor information.
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