May 24, 2023 | Issue 3245
Last week, the reality light comedy short drama "1818 Editorial Office" adapted from the people's livelihood news program "1818 Golden Eye" announced the start, and the official micro launched a small vote on the same day: Whose news adaptation are you most looking forward to seeing?
The adaptation of news hotspots into dramas is a regular operation of topical dramas in recent years. As an important way for people to participate in social issues, hot search has penetrated into everyone's daily life, and inevitably affects the creation of entertainment products.
Topical dramas refer to it from the content, form and even personality, there are thousands of creators in short videos telling the same story every day, and 5,000 words of online articles with more than 8,000 words a day are adapted news of the day... The entertainment market seems to have entered an unprecedented stage of high homogenization.
When these products are crowded together, the audience is trapped in a situation where there is no escape, which in turn evokes a physical rejection and antipathy.
Of course, this is only an individual experience, but it is not necessarily a universal perception. As far as dramas are concerned, when we discuss blockbuster dramas and quality dramas, we rarely mention topical dramas, they are often different from the optimistic imagination in the project book, and it is difficult to achieve the grandeur of public discussion after broadcasting, and it seems to be fate to end quietly.
One of the most immediate problems is that they don't have freshness. From the birth to the end of a hot event, it has to go through countless times in people's eyes through different media, and by the time it is the turn of the series, the audience is already physically and mentally exhausted.
In recent conferences, from industry bigwigs to creators have tirelessly emphasized innovation on various occasions, although this is the least innovative topic, but from the perspective of popular dramas and quality dramas since this year, freshness has become the first indicator of good dramas. In fact, the famous foreign Rotten Tomatoes website is based on freshness (Fresh) as an indicator to evaluate the quality of works.
Today's "film and television seven-day thought" tries to talk about the transformation of the series from the perspective of freshness.
The art of directing
"Film is the art of directing, TV series is the art of screenwriting", this widely circulated sentence implies the positioning of a good director of TV series: fast hands, good work, and management.
But now, it's not entirely true. Perhaps the production company will still select directors from the level of cost control and other aspects, but in the hearts of loyal audiences, they have cherished the strengths and weaknesses of each director: this director's scenery is beautiful, and that director's big scene is well shot... The importance of directors is increasingly reflected in the feedback of the audience.
In recent years, Douban's highest-scoring drama "Long Season" is not a traditional drama work, but incorporates a lot of personal expression from the director. From the smooth and artistic lens language to the iconic children's songs; From a large number of "Biao Xue" memes, to intriguing background music; From the original script of "Winter Blade" to the unusual "Long Season", Xin Shuang has put a clear mark on this drama.
The unconventional operation of "The Long Season" shows that the production process of traditional dramas has changed. The increasingly fierce "disc drama" of the audience means that people are no longer satisfied with the drama as a fast-moving consumer goods living room culture, but have placed greater value and ideological sustenance on them.
From this level, the transformed drama is neither like an online drama nor a traditional TV series.
This metamorphosis is completed by the joint efforts of creators and audiences, and the "plate drama" that the audience is keen on may certainly bring public opinion risks to the play, and will also form a push to force creators to pay attention to details and express effectively as a whole.
The art of immersion
The frequent appearance of good dramas this year proves that dramas do not need to cater to the audience's viewing habits after being transformed by short videos.
The viewing habit mentioned here is to listen to TV dramas as radio dramas, and to see short video dramas as a kind of drama chasing behavior.
Or take "The Long Season" as an example, audiences watching the show will always have several impressive shots. For example, after Wang Yang met Shen Mo, the background sound when bathing at home was a piano song played by Shen Mo, with a cheerful tune and a bright painting style, and a boy's irrepressible love for a girl jumped on the screen. But when he lowered his head and raised it again, the tone turned cold in vain, the piano music turned to sadness, and then looked at Wang Yang in the washing mirror, it was already a sad and fearful face.
For example, there is a scene in the second episode that is taken of Wang Xiang hanging on the wall a photo of the factory director going to the hospital to comfort him, and this scene completely presents the pride of a middle-aged man and the pride of a worker. It seems to be idle, but it is actually echoed in the twelfth episode:
Wang Xiang personally took off the photo and replaced it with a portrait of his son. In both scenes, he said exactly the same thing to his wife, "The right way is not the right way? But the state of mind, tone and state were already very different, and a father's spiritual world collapsed at that moment.
This kind of thrill of immersive drama chasing is something that cannot be experienced by slicing chasing dramas and listening to radio dramas. We often say that the charm of a work often lies in the process of the story, not the outcome, and that the series should use unique audiovisual language and foreshadowing stories as weapons to fight against competition from short videos and other entertainment products, while defending the territory.
As Xin Shuang said in the interview, don't underestimate the audience, underestimation is a kind of creator's arrogance; And don't be afraid that the audience will misinterpret the work, being misinterpreted is the fate of all works, and this misinterpretation may produce a new sense of beauty.
The art of thinking
Immersive viewing often brings effective thinking, and an important value of long videos lies in ideology, which allows audiences to start thinking, empathize, and even affect people's values.
The simple phrase "Look forward, don't look back" in "The Long Season" is very touching and triggers thinking about the changes in life and the times. A sigh from a small person can also be very powerful.
The second online drama "Echo" directed by Feng Xiaogang is the most underrated work in my personal heart this year. Many people rush to the suspense line and return disappointed, but if you talk about the emotional line alone, it is a rare masterpiece in recent years.
Teacher Liu Heng said that the longest lasting and ubiquitous war of mankind is the war between men and women. This war is always brewing, breaking out, continuing, and changing tricks. But the battle between males and females is the source of love and the source of hate.
This phrase is deeply reflected in "Echoes". There is a large basket of plays that explore the emotional topics of both sexes, but there are not many works like "Echo" that are so calm, so realistic, unpredetermined, full of philosophical speculation, and frequent golden sentences. It jumps out of the either/or and black-and-white that is so easy to appear in hot discussions, and describes the emotional truth between the sexes with cold and rational brushstrokes.
Of course, it is indeed debatable whether some of the written dialogue of the characters in the play is appropriate, but these are important factors for its literary preservation, which is another topic at the creative level, leaving it aside here, paste a golden sentence evaluating the TV series in the original work:
"This may be the reason why many TV series today are 'not good': he said what he shouldn't say, he did what he shouldn't do, which doesn't fit this person at all." Of course, the audience thinks it's not good. ”
The author's art
Talking about "Echo" can't bypass Feng Xiaogang, can't bypass him and do the opposite.
Emphasis on emotion and light on suspense, which is a "foggy aesthetic" that rebels against the audience; abandon the common color matching in suspense dramas and creatively use the light green of moss in the wall crevice as the main color; Abandon the episodic adaptation and retain the literary nature of the original ... These are "willful" from the author, fresh, interesting, and thought-provoking.
In addition to him, there are Zhang Dalei and Li Xiang.
"Moses on the Plain" directed by Zhang Dalei was shortlisted for the drama unit of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival this year, becoming the first Chinese-language work shortlisted in the nine years since the unit's establishment.
The authorship of this drama is reflected in the nostalgic atmosphere, realistic style, soothing rhythm, non-professional actors... These characteristics are almost a continuation of his literary film "August", Zhang Dalei is almost using the thinking of movies to create online dramas, which has caused a lot of discussion, some people are happy, others can't understand or even angry.
"Grandma's New World", written and produced by Li Xiang, sets the protagonist as a "rebellious" grandmother who has only entered adolescence at the age of sixty, and has made twelve movies in the shell of online dramas, broadening the expression of online dramas and broadening the selection range of protagonists.
Many times, the wild road is the right way, and the so-called right way is actually a dead end. In the development of Chinese drama, there must be such a group of creators dancing in places where we exceed our imagination.
The art of emotions
A few days ago, the effective playback volume of the feature film of "Crazy" officially exceeded 10 billion in "Yunhe Data", becoming another work to enter the 10 billion club after "Qing Yu Nian".
Why is "Crazy" so popular this year? There is an opinion that it satisfies a primitive emotional impulse of people, and some people see a history of breakthroughs of the people at the bottom, a blackening road of honest people; Others see the simple truth that justice is belated; There is also the human body smell of the feminine charm of "sister-in-law" and "sister Lan".
When the crazy emotions gradually faded, many people found that they could not be Gao Qiqiang, nor could they become An Xin, but more likely to be the old migrant worker who was pushed downstairs by Lao Mo. In short, it satisfies the emotional expression of different groups of people at different stages.
Emotional value can determine the fate of a series. "The Three-Body Problem", which was broadcast at the same time as "Crazy", the story is Chinese, the characters are Chinese, the plan to save mankind is proposed by the Chinese, and the actual commander of the "Guzheng Action" is also Chinese, but it took the initiative to abandon this emotional creation of "national pride" and retained the thinking about "a community with a shared future for mankind" in the original work.
At a time when movie dramas are willing to consume a handful of "national pride", why doesn't such a choice create another new wind?
【Text/Xu Xinqiang】