In a bookstore in Guangzhou, many readers are reading. (Visual China photo)
What is the financial expenditure of Rongguo Mansion in "Dream of Red Mansions" in a year?
Li Yanfei has made rough statistics, and his regular expenses for a year, such as the monthly money, portions, food and clothing expenses of about 400 people in the house, are about 40,000 taels, and some other unconventional expenses involving personal contacts are about 30,000 taels. Not counting the cost of building the Grand View Garden, it is conservatively estimated that Rongguo Mansion will need to spend about 70,000 taels a year.
The above is the angle that Li Yanfei cut into when he explained "Dream of Red Mansions". He is a book blogger who started explaining literature through short videos three years ago and currently has about 1.2 million followers on Douyin. In the past, short video commentary film and television dramas were popular, and now, the use of short videos to explain literary works has also become an option.
According to the "2023 Douyin Reading Ecological Data Report", in the past year, the number of reading videos with a duration of more than 5 minutes on Douyin has increased by 279.44% year-on-year, the number of reading video playbacks has increased by 65.17% year-on-year, the number of collections has increased by 276.14% year-on-year, and the number of live viewers has nearly doubled year-on-year.
On social platforms, searching for short videos explaining literary works, you can find that there are not only three to five minutes to explain a work, but also Li Yanfei who is divided into more than a dozen episodes to explain. In the same way, bloggers have a variety of explanations, such as charts and animations, which have become auxiliary ways to lead short video users into the world of literature.
"Make the ingredients good and feed them to everyone's eyes"
Initially, out of interest, Li Yanfei commented on the movie "Dune". In order to do a good job in this series, he also explained the original work of "Dune", but he didn't expect that this tome aroused the reading memories of many netizens.
They told Li Yanfei that many literary works, such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or some Russian literature, have complex character relationships and plots, and it is difficult to remember or read them. At everyone's suggestion, Li Yanfei turned to a commentary on literary works. He positioned himself as, "Just be a porter, or a cook, which is equivalent to making the ingredients and feeding them to everyone, seeing if (they) want to eat them."
The first literary work he explained was "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which was divided into 21 episodes, each seven or eight minutes long. He read this work many years ago, and he didn't understand it halfway, and basically forgot the plot of the characters. Before making the video, he watched it six more times, and specially bought a whiteboard to clarify the background, character relationships and plot, which took about a month to prepare.
Explainer copy is important, and it's not easy to organize. Li Yanfei needs to think about where to start and how to speak in order for the audience to understand. In the book "One Hundred Years of Solitude", the names of people are highly repetitive and easy to remember, so every time he mentions a person's name, he uses one or two sentences to summarize what he has done to deepen the audience's memory.
Li Yanfei didn't want to simply introduce the storyline, in his opinion, if he blindly repeated the plot, it would not be much different from those three-minute or five-minute explanations. Moreover, he argues, in these shorter explainer videos, the differences between works are weakened, and the storylines all sound similar, nothing more than how the narrator lives and how he dies.
"What I want to talk about is why he has these differences, why he has different lives in different cultural backgrounds, different joys and sorrows, different births, old age, sickness and death. He said.
When commenting on "One Hundred Years of Solitude", Li Yanfei consulted many documents, including "The Severed Blood Vessels in Latin America", and also watched related documentaries, adding rich social background information to the video, and then specially integrated these historical backgrounds into a new video of nine episodes - "History Hidden in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for the audience to understand.
When explaining, Li Yanfei will integrate her own thinking and try to provide new perspectives of interpretation. For example, in Dream of Red Mansions, he does not repeat the plot of the story in a straightforward manner, but from a financial point of view, by analyzing the usual expenses of Jiafu to explain why it finally declined.
Li Yanfei's character relationship diagram made to explain "One Hundred Years of Solitude". (Photo provided by the interviewee)
Zhou Yu is also a short video blogger who explains literary works, and he has been using commentary as a side job since May 2023, and most of the videos are about 5 minutes long.
For the commentary copy, he has formed a set of methodology, which is basically a "three-paragraph style": at the beginning, he uses one or two sentences to point out the influence or topicality of the book to attract the audience's attention, such as "The Late Bloomer", which he introduced as "Mo Yan's first work after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature"; the main part usually introduces the plot of the story, retains and deletes the plot according to the theme presented, and at the same time integrates the reading perception into it; at the end, he will excerpt one or two popular underlined sentences of the book in WeChat reading as a "golden sentence" Deepen the impression of the audience.
Li Yanfei has a background in graphic design, and some of the pictures in the commentary video are drawn by himself, such as the relationship between the characters in "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and some are materials found in documentary materials, such as the characters and environmental pictures that appear in the commentary video of "Dream of Red Mansions", which he used retouching software to cut out from a Qing Dynasty album and then make it into a dynamic effect later.
In addition, he will also use charts or insert film and television images to make the explanation clear and rich, and charts are used in the "Rongguofu Accounts of Human Relations" section of "Dream of Red Mansions".
After doing a lot of commentary videos, Li Yanfei can basically imagine what kind of materials he needs to find and what filters he needs to add to fill the picture when writing copywriting. If the subject is a lonely protagonist, then the environment in which he lives should be very simple, and when looking for material, he should look for a picture with only a bed or a table, mainly in cold colors.
Zhou Yu's explainer video is relatively simple, mostly in hand-drawn text, but he has recently been experimenting with animation and adding chapter progress bars. For example, when explaining Maugham's "The Veil", he is divided into four parts: "putting on the veil, falling into the abyss, waking up from a dream, and unveiling", and some viewers can skip directly to the relevant chapters if they don't have the patience to listen to it from the beginning.
It may make the audience lose their own thoughts
The average time it takes for Zhou Yu to write a commentary is about two hours, and he uses some scattered time to complete it, coming up with an outline of the story on his commute to work, and then writing out the key points when he gets home in the evening. Video production is complicated, and a 5-minute video takes about 1-3 hours to complete.
He updates twice a week. In his opinion, the most time-consuming part is actually reading books, reading is the first place, he will spend three or four hours a day reading, "reading books is very important, if you have a different level of understanding of the book, the copywriting is also different, (even) no matter how good the video is, it may not have a good effect", Zhou Yu said.
Li Yanfei spent about three months producing the "One Hundred Years of Solitude" video series, investing seven or eight hours a day, from four or five p.m. to the early hours of the morning, forming a copy of about 80,000 words. His update frequency is one update a week, however, he found that many netizens have forgotten the content of the previous week when watching the video of the week, which is especially obvious when he updates the nine episodes of "History Hidden in "One Hundred Years of Solitude".
"In today's fast-paced life, people may not care about what is being said here, and they can't remember it. Especially when it comes to the deeper historical background, Li Yanfei said that the audience does not have much patience to wait for updates, so when he later explains other books, he will directly integrate the historical background into the explanation of the plot, and no longer bring it out alone.
For Li Yanfei, it takes him half a month to make a one-hour commentary video, of which it takes a week to write 30,000 or 40,000 words of copywriting, and the remaining week is used to make videos. And that's not even counting the time spent reading books, which he reads five or six times in order to make explainer videos, and usually uses the evening before bed to read.
According to his observation, many viewers watch the commentary video because they are busy, or they are impatient and can't understand it, and some want to listen to other interpretation angles. He understands very well, he couldn't understand it when he watched "Dream of Red Mansions" before, even if he picked up the book many times to read, and even deliberately listed the relationship diagram of the characters to assist, but every time he still gave up after reading half of it.
As a business major, Zhou Yu will also find it obscure when reading some literary works. He had read Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Basement" before, and there was a lot of monologue in the text, which was not very storytelling, and had a strong philosophical meaning. He didn't know much about the social background at that time, and he still couldn't understand the author's intentions until he finished reading the book.
He can understand the audience's mentality of watching short video commentary, everyone is usually tired from work, and when they go home, they may want to lie down and watch some videos that are not so brain-consuming, and short video commentary literary works just provide a new form, "You don't have to work so hard, you can also understand a book, and it can be regarded as learning."
However, he feels that these kinds of explainer videos may make viewers lose their own thoughts, "Maybe what I interpret is different from what you actually see, [because] the perception is different," he said. Moreover, in a few minutes of commentary video, it is possible that only one side of the character can be presented, and there are some trade-offs, but "(if) you read carefully, you will see that human nature is very complex, not so simple good and bad".
Li Yanfei also believes that compared with reading the original work, the short video commentary can only let the audience understand the general plot, and more in-depth, such as the causes of someone's tragic fate, these things hidden "under the iceberg" may be omitted. It's just that in today's fast-paced society, short video commentary on literary works is also a way to attract audiences to read. After watching his commentary video, many netizens really went to buy books to read.
Li Yanfei remembers that there was a netizen who had almost no reading habits, and after watching the commentary series of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", he went to buy an original book, and then every time he read a resonant chapter, he would write a large paragraph and send a private message to tell Li Yanfei about his reading progress and insights.
This brings a sense of accomplishment, "There are still some people who will be influenced by this content to develop their patience and interest, which is actually a kind of progress," Li Yanfei said.
"I'm just a ladder, and everyone steps on this ladder to go up and see the other side of the wall, and if you think the scenery on the other side of the wall is good, you can keep going, and if you think it can't work, you can go down. He told Southern Weekly.
(At the request of the interviewee, Zhou Yu is a pseudonym)
Southern Weekly reporter Weng Rongrong and Southern Weekly intern Dong Jiadi
Editor-in-charge: Li Muyan