Image source@Visual China
文｜新声Pro，作者 | 高寒
Wong Kar-wai's six-year-long and well-polished drama "Flowers" finally met the audience on Tencent Video.
The adaptation of the drama follows the consistent tone of Wong Kar-wai's works, through the well-designed aesthetic world and the constructed lens language, so that the director's keen perception of the environmental atmosphere and the inner heart of the characters can be presented in the form of images.
However, in terms of story, "Flowers" does not use emotional details to draw consciousness to form a narrative like Wong Kar-wai's previous films, but provides a relatively faster narrative rhythm and a denser amount of information to tell the relationship between the times and people. Let the audience see how Bao, who has nothing, has become a powerful "Bao Zong".
This is even different from the original. In fact, the original work of "Flowers" does not have a clear story line, and there is not even a prominent protagonist, like a storyteller, telling the story of Shanghai across time and space.
Wong Kar-wai, who is not so "literary", has received praise from the audience, and has also left a high-quality case for film directors to direct dramas.
From the beginning of the long video platform's attempt to make itself, the film director is the object of the platform's great efforts, and in the last stage of traffic competition, the snatching of head director resources is sometimes even radical. Their creative trajectory has also developed from the initial strong genre to a more stylistic and even more non-standard direction.
Not all of these attempts have been successful, and while the platform intends to continue to promote this collaboration, despite seeing film directors as a pioneer in bringing innovation, it has indeed become more cautious about setting up and investing in specific projects.
At the same time, more and more film directors are seeing drama as a creative direction that must be faced. This has led to an interesting shift in location, where the platforms have become more cautious, but the directors have been more aggressive.
Groping in twists and turns
In 1989, when David Lynch was chatting with the producers, he suddenly had a flash of inspiration and the image of a corpse washed ashore in his mind. Immediately, he filmed "Twin Peaks: Pilot", which made the audience love and hate, telling the story of FBI agents who go to Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of a middle school girl.
The film's ubiquitous mysteries and strange suspicions fascinate the audience, but the end is inconclusive, leaving the audience curious and angry. Faced with the project's huge success and overwhelming audience enthusiasm, HBO decided to let Lynch get his wish and continue Twin Peaks into a full-length series.
"Twin Peaks", with its dark humor, dark pictures, and mysterious soundtrack, brought a strong impact on the soap operas of American television stations at that time.
Netflix, which was later established, also received high attention and praise in 2013 with David Fincher's "House of Cards", which established its position in the field of self-produced content on webcasting platforms.
Back in China, film directors tried to make themselves on the long video platform at the beginning of their creative forces.
In fact, in the development of self-made online dramas on the platform in the past ten years, there has never been a lack of participation from film directors. From the super online drama "Tomb Robbery Notes" directed by Zheng Baorui and Luo Yongchang in 2014 on iQiyi, to the past three years, the public's viewing Xi has changed, the film market has been cold, directors have embraced transformation, and more and more film directors have begun to find their own creative space in the field of streaming media.
iQIYI has broadcast the suspense drama "Octagonal Pavilion Mystery Fog" directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, "Feng Qi Longxi" directed by Lu Yang, "North and South" directed by Feng Xiaogang, "Moses on the Plains" directed by Zhang Dalei, and the drama version of "Detective Chinatown" supervised by Chen Sicheng. In the 2024 film list, there is also "Ball Lightning" directed by Dai Mo.
Youku's 2024 film list appears "Snow Maze" produced by Zhang Yimou and directed by Lu Xing, "Once Upon a Time by the Water" produced by Cao Baoping and "New Life" directed by the Olympic bid.
Directors who have had good box office results in the film field have not been stable in terms of dramas.
In the face of new frontiers, some film directors are more willing to challenge themselves in narrative areas that they are not good at when directing dramas. However, compared with the large-span attempt of "new fields + new themes", the directors of film and drama works "in the same vein" will have a stronger control over the project.
"Feng Qi Longxi", which belongs to the same costume suspense as the "Embroidered Spring Knife" series, is better than "The Fog of the Octagonal Pavilion" directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, whose masterpiece is not a suspense theme. Although it continues the creative theme of family in Wang Xiaoshuai's works, the slow narrative rhythm makes this drama, which has been polished for 4 years, seem to have not achieved satisfactory results for the audience.
Who's pushing
For online video platforms, dramas are the start-up period of a new category, and "explosive style + traffic" is undoubtedly the fastest way to open up the situation. However, as the scope of the audience gradually expands and the audience has a certain cognitive foundation for online dramas, they will put forward higher iterative requirements for content.
At this year's iQIYI World Conference, Wang Xiaohui, chief content officer of iQIYI and president of the professional content business group (PCG), mentioned that the audience's rigid demand for excellent works is eternal, and the creative ability of creators is unlimited.
For the platform, from casting a wide net to "walking" to establishing brand awareness, so that the audience can expand their love and trust for the work to the love and trust of the platform, more differentiated high-quality content support is needed. As Wang Xiaohui said, "the only is more important than the first".
With non-standard and innovative works such as "The Long Season" becoming the head content, it has shown a huge driving force, and has also brought more reference cases and broader possibilities to the platform.
The boundaries of innovation are determined by the creator. When the boundaries of drama are broadened to the point that it is difficult for existing creative groups to meet, the platform will naturally seek more cross-border talent support. It is important to note that this expansion is not only from the overall strategic needs of the platform, but also sometimes affected by the reality of performance pressure from executive producers.
For producers, in addition to having more stylized and personalized expression in personal creation, cooperating with film directors is often the most direct and efficient way to contact more high-quality production resources.
In the eyes of creators, compared with the market environment and trends, what they pay more attention to is always the development and continuation of their personal creative vitality.
Feng Xiaogang bluntly said in an interview that the reason for choosing "Echo" is because it is a line about criminal investigation and solving cases, and the other line about emotional marriage, and the two lines are intertwined, and the script of "Dual Channel" is more full and three-dimensional.
Lu Yang said in an interview that he has always been interested in the details of history, and usually likes to look for details of the era that are not recorded in the official history, or are not even recorded. Compared with "Embroidered Spring Knife", which focuses on the narrative of costume suspense films, "Feng Qi Longxi" brings spy war and workplace elements that are rare in the genre under the coat of the costume genre.
"I am fascinated by the exploration of the fate of small people in history. In addition, for us who do creative work, "new" is a particularly important thing, and it has a fatal attraction for us. 」
Lu Chuan also believes that he will take over the series between directing movies in the future. In the past few years, he has watched a lot of excellent drama works at home and abroad, and also observed that there is an extremely close interaction between the drama series and the audience. In his opinion, the hard work of many young colleagues in the drama track is respectable, and it is they who have improved the quality of Chinese dramas. Drama is a track worth practicing, and it is also a creative direction that you must face as a film director.
From the time of filming "All or Nothing", he wanted to challenge the narrative of the panoramic group portrait structure. However, the movie is limited by the length of the movie, and it is difficult to achieve. In the process of directing the series "New Life", this idea finally had a chance to come true. For him, it is a very happy and happy thing to be able to tell a 400-minute story and explore the subtler details of human nature and the relationship between the characters. In addition, he also wanted to take advantage of the long viewing cycle of the series to try to lead the audience to experience the sense of interaction with the characters.
Of course, market factors cannot be ignored, Internet platforms have a large number of high-quality resources and head projects, and their needs will naturally have an impact on the creative direction of practitioners. The same situation appeared earlier in the field of artists, Qin Hao mentioned that he was influenced by Zhou Xun when he took over the filming of "Undocumented Crime", he was curious why Zhou Xun took "The Legend of Ruyi", and the answer he got was that the movie scripts looking for me were so stupid, why couldn't they make online dramas.
Water and soil are not adapted to each other
At the beginning of cross-border cooperation, the field of drama often used the term "dimensionality reduction" to describe the cooperation with film directors, and it is expected that the new team can use the "cinematic sense" to improve the quality and aesthetics of the series. But with repeated setbacks in attempts, the sound of film directors filming dramas "not adapting to the soil" began to emerge gradually.
In the minds of many film directors, dramas are more like "extended movies". David Lynch made "Twin Peaks" as a complete movie, and Wang Xiaoshuai also believes that the audience should look at "The Fog of the Octagonal Pavilion" in a cinematic way. However, whether the creator and the audience can reach an agreement on the positioning and cognition of the project greatly affects the perception and feedback of the work.
If the whole drama can be broadcast in one go, maybe the audience does have the opportunity to watch the series as a super-long movie. However, due to factors such as the rhythm of the broadcast and the speed of updates, some cinematic narratives may not have an advantage in the context of watching dramas. The narrative rhythm and amount of information in a single episode greatly affect the audience experience, and whether the audience who passes by by chance can continue to follow along.
For directors who are good at genre narratives, the experience of attracting the audience's continuous attention through a strong narrative rhythm can be transplanted between films and dramas, and it is more flexible and adaptable. For directors who are better at exploring the boundaries of expression, the drama will amplify the "literary temperament" of the work. A super-long literary film will undoubtedly raise the threshold for viewing and limit the breadth of the market.
Director Zhang Dalei, who won the Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film and the Silver Bear Award for Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival, chose to continue his naturalistic shooting technique when directing the drama "Moses on the Plains". There is a lot of space in the film to show the appearance of daily life, and many long shots that follow the perspective of the characters and go through to the end are used to create an atmosphere that triggers the audience's memory. However, some viewers don't seem to buy this "bland and useless oriental connotation", and word-of-mouth is polarized, with some people thinking that "the narrative pace is slow" and "there are too many waste shots".
On the other hand, "authorial director" does not necessarily mean high and low. Because of their strong personal style, they have a better chance of being remembered by the audience and are often seen as a breakthrough point for innovation. For example, for Wong Kar-wai's "Flowers", which has been deeply involved in "Shanghai Story" for many years, the audience is still full of patience and expectation because they have a basic understanding of the director's style and think that the director is familiar with the subject matter, even if they have waited for many years. The director's vivid memory left to the audience made the film look forward to it from the moment it released the first trailer.
However, the platform's perception of the project is more based on user feedback and data support. It is often difficult to find benchmark works, user analysis, and reference cases that have formed data feedback for innovative works brought by film directors, and the platform will also lack a starting point when making revenue deduction and data estimation.
Yang Bei, the producer of "Feng Qi Longxi", mentioned in an interview that this drama is too special in the market of ancient puppets and male frequency, and "there is basically no benchmark".
Under the pressure of the platform's need to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", if it does not have a sufficiently convincing ROI, it will undoubtedly make the project progress passive. Film teams that produce cross-border dramas need to spend more effort than ever before to convince the platform to "take risks" with them.
In addition, the different cycles and rhythms of film and drama projects also exacerbate the difficulty of running-in between the director team and the platform. A 12-episode x 35-minute episode requires more than 400 minutes of effective footage. For a film of a regular size, the effective material requirement is about 90-200 minutes, and the workload can be said to increase exponentially.
Compared with the "slow work and meticulous work" of film shooting, the drama series emphasizes the control of the shooting cycle, and the work rhythm is more compact than that of the movie. When Lu Chuan was filming "Extraordinary Doctor", he basically worked 14-16 hours a day, which lasted for more than 80 days. He admitted that filming more than 12 episodes of the series was really hard work. When I think back to making a movie, 100 minutes of content can be used for months, which is such a luxury.
When Wong Kar-wai directed "Flowers", he still followed his previous model, spending a long time in the early stage of creation, landing in a studio in Shanghai, collecting and sorting out a lot of information, and demanding himself with exquisite standards, so this work stayed on Tencent Video's film list for 6 years. Whether it is the resource support required for the ultra-long project cycle, or the risk of the changing viewing environment and the adaptability of the work to the current audience at that time, the platform needs to take great responsibility and give the director the greatest trust.
The show's attempt to explore outward is still worth it
The current environment of the film and television content industry has quietly changed from an incremental market to a stock market. Major online video platforms have also adjusted their strategies to face the quality competition brought about by market saturation.
Wang Xiaohui regards "serving mature minds with high-quality content" as one of iQIYI's core strategies in the next stage, and Sun Zhonghuai also believes that simple fast food can no longer satisfy the audience, and the industry needs to return to common sense and rationality. In the new industry cycle, high-quality content will continue to be a battleground.
There is no upper limit to the platform's pursuit of content quality, but the management strategy is more refined, and the attitude towards innovation attempts is visibly more and more cautious. Compared with fame and brand, the platform began to pay more attention to the quality of the content itself and how the participants empowered the project. This means that there may be more funds and resources to favor high-quality non-head talents, and middle-waist practitioners may usher in more opportunities.
The tightening of the policies of the first-tier platforms for self-made projects has also allowed platforms such as Youku and Mango TV to have a gap to absorb creators and try to establish their own brands by relying on word-of-mouth works. In terms of expanding the crossover of film directors, he has shown a more positive attitude.
At the investment conference on November 11, Mango Drama released the "super partner" model, and officially announced that it had reached cooperation with Gao Qunshu, Guo Jingming, Liang Zhenhua and other well-known directors and screenwriters in the industry. The trend of continuing to expand partners in the drama field is likely to continue. For film directors to bring more innovative drama works, the platform and the audience still have confidence and patience.
However, different from the previous "one family", for the cross-border cooperation of film directors, the platform is no longer the party that bears the risk alone, but forms a closer community of interests with the director and production team. For film directors who want to expand the field of drama series, in addition to giving full play to their own advantages and producing high-reputation products, they also need to be tested by the market in order to live up to the trust and make partners more assured to continue to invest.
Although the collaboration between the platform and the artist, most of them are hovering left and right in terms of experience and lessons. However, Chen Xiao, vice president of iQIYI, believes that "continuing this process allows us to continue to co-create with the most advanced ideas and artists in the market, and this top-level production relationship is the most important."
In his view, artists are often islands. When they are islands, their value to this era is very limited. Chen Xiao hopes to use the advantages of the platform to build a network of creators, break the boundaries of the industry, enhance the vitality of the interaction of the industry circle, and let more artists participate in the production unit. When they are on the network nodes, it is more helpful to stimulate the artist to obtain and output information. In a way, this represents the platform's sense of responsibility.
At the same time, as the film market gradually recovers, film directors also need to rethink themselves and explore what the core drivers of the drama space are.
A practitioner revealed, "On the whole, TV dramas are more difficult to do, and the profits are thin. The platform's customized dramas may only have 8%-10% of the income, and after calculating various losses such as publicity and overspending, it may not be as high as bank financial management."
Based on different business models, it is easier for production teams to have a high degree of autonomy in terms of the likelihood of a film profiting from the box office and the ease of financing. Compared with the "director-centered system" in film crews, dramas need to be passed and graded on the platform due to a wider range of audiences, so the director needs to give up some authority and right to speak.
When the platform is unable to provide a foundation for free creation and the revenue space is limited, whether it is a wider range of themes, a larger creative space, or the precipitation of its own label image, or the construction of a broader IP territory...... Film directors always have to find some reasons that are closer to the essence in order to support themselves to go further in the field of dramas.