Author|Apo
The domestic dramas in 2024 will go smoothly on the road of realistic themes, and turn their heads to look at the Korean dramas that producers love to benchmark and reference......
"Running with Good Jae on Your Back" won 9 points on Douban with the setting of star-chasing topics and time loops, Korea's ratings doubled rapidly, young female prosecutors and aunts changed their bodies every day "Her Day and Night" played a new trick of female topic dramas, "Romantic Physique" screenwriter Lee Byung-hun let himself go and filmed a hunting drama "Fried Chicken Nuggets Adventure" in love with people and fried chicken nuggets to reward himself, and the monster siege adventure battle royale drama "Sweet Home 3" kicked off again on Netflix.
I have to admit that before discussing whether Korean dramas are "filmed well or not", it is eye-catching enough in the breadth of "high concept". The high concept is a discourse from Hollywood, and the original meaning is roughly that the movie needs to have commercial highlights in audio-visual, plot, team, etc., and extends to the current TV drama market, becoming synonymous with fantasy themes with special settings, fantasy, science fiction, soft science fiction, dayfantasy, etc......
Two years ago, driven by the atmosphere of "The Beginning" and the account-sharing ceiling drama "Twinkle Twinkle and Twinkle Star", "high-concept dramas" became the "annual topic" of local film and television themes. The high-concept romance drama combo of "Love Theater" and the star of "Basic Law of Genius" have also accumulated enough topics and highlights for this theme.
The soul dialogue of "one body and two souls" in the Basic Law of Genius
Then the topic of "high-concept dramas entering the explosive period" lasted only a year, and it seemed to be completely "extinguished", and no work caused a certain scale of discussion.
High concept is obviously a very interesting theme, and the scale of similar online novels is also expanding rapidly, indicating that Chinese do not lack fantasy, but there are fewer and fewer high concepts in film and television dramas, and the rapid heating and extinguishing of "high-concept dramas" around two years ago and then is what is it for? Entertainment Capital (ID: Yulezibenlun) listened to the opinions of some creators.
Note: The names of the interviewees in this article have been changed.
In recent years, there are incomplete statistics on high-concept dramas and high-concept dramas to be broadcast
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High Concepts is ditching sweet pets
When it comes to "high-concept dramas", audiences who watch local online dramas grow up should be no strangers, the "My Wonderful Boyfriend" series starring Wu Qian and Yu Shuxin, the early masterpieces of this theme, and the Hunan Satellite TV ratings champion drama "Love Through the Millennium" series cooperated by the Chinese and Korea teams.
By 2021, iQIYI's "Lian Lian Theater" will be launched, and it will officially position the theater style with "high concept + CP", and will walk out of "The Day I Became You", "My Villain Boyfriend", "My Secret Roommate" and other works with a good reputation of more than 7 points on Douban, and high concept seems to have been recognized as the most suitable superimposed theme practice for sweet pets and romance dramas.
The high-concept theme that was so optimistic in 2022 will suddenly decline in output in 2023, which has a lot to do with the decline in the number of sweet pets and romance self-made dramas in the process of reducing costs and increasing efficiency in the market. The "Lian Lian Theater", which was originally a "high-concept sweet pet test field", will suddenly change to a "head ancient puppet drama" in 2023, and the realistic theme effect brought by the explosion of "The World" has also invisibly brought new creative orientation to the creators.
"There are both subjective and objective reasons." Screenwriter Xian Xi told Xiaoyu that firstly, it is true that the platform's increase in realistic themes has formed a subtle influence on many individual creators who usually do not have much contact with the platform and Party A, so that everyone has the impression that "the platform will need more realistic themes in the past two years", and not long ago, he reworked a high-concept sweet pet script that he wrote earlier, removed the high-concept part, and made the plot and character design more realistic and empathetic to young people.
Second, in the practice of "romance +", although the high-concept elements are more eye-catching than other elements, the practice has been too simple and instrumentalized for a long time, and even the high-concept romance dramas made are more like "talking about the same love in a high-concept coat", so Xi Xi believes that it is normal for such a highly homogeneous theme to be eliminated.
In Xi Xi's impression, the high-concept setting that matches the romance theme usually revolves around the three modes of "time and space", "soul" and "alien".
AI Mapping by Entertainment Capital
The gameplay of time and space is mainly based on time and space loop, time and space travel and different time and space.
"I Want to See You" and "Twinkle Twinkle Twinkle Star" are masterpieces of the time and space cycle in recent years, the male and female protagonists are trapped in the time and space of the Mobius ring, repeating the tragedy and deepening the relationship, until the two join hands and break the cycle with the power of love. This kind of time loop usually matches the plot with suspense elements because it has its own logical threshold.
Sohu's self-made drama "You Running to All Time and Space" this year, the male protagonist finds the murderer of the female protagonist and prevents the heroine's death in a circular journey; Li Yitong and Jin Han starred in "Dark Clouds Meet the Bright Moon" is based on the novel of the same name by the famous suspense novel author Ding Mo.
"Love Through the Millennium" and "Love Theater" in "Romance of Time and Space" and "My Secret Roommate" are masterpieces of time and space travel. In this kind of setting, there are two ways to play with a large and smaller time and space distance between the male and female protagonists, if the time and space are larger, such as the Republic of China and even ancient people who travel to modern times, there will be a lot of fun through the large cognitive dislocation between the male and female protagonists and the difference in the times; If it is "My Secret Roommate" and "Time Countdown to Meet You", the time difference is only between ten or twenty years, suspense elements will also be added, and the male and female protagonists will take advantage of the time and space gap to work together to hunt for the murderer across time and space, and the movie "Living Together in Time and Space" is also the same logic.
The gameplay of different time and space is mainly based on normal time and space, the former focuses on creating a parallel time and space that is completely different from the real world, so that the protagonist has more imagination in this parallel time and space to accomplish things that cannot be done in the real world; The latter allows the protagonist to enter the game, novel, manga, etc., in the challenge of different story copies.
"My Babylon Lover" is the completion of the super romantic love fantasy of the second middle school girl Chen Meiru, and "Super Time and Space Player" is a refreshing life that satisfies the male proposition Ye to marry his lover and reach the peak of life. The well-known Korean drama "W Two Worlds" and "Come to Your World" directed and produced by Deng Ke are both based on the Hong Kong film "Fairy in the Painting" mode of "Wandering"; "My Villain Boyfriend" and "Cannon Fodder Raiders" are the fast passages of the novel, which are only because the characters of the novel wear out of the book to the real world, or the real characters wear into the story world of the novel.
The gameplay of aliens is mainly to meet the needs of soft science fiction and "can't become a spirit after the founding of the country", from "Falling in Love· Chitose Adult's First Love" to "Sito", "Meow, Please Make a Wish", "Yusheng Knows You" is to position the protagonist of the non-human side as an alien creature, but the alien is in line with our perception of the monster in the Zhiwei novel. Or directly like "Hello, My Orange Lover", wrapping the non-humans in it with the science of AI robots.
"There are so many ways to play, if you only take it as a gimmick, it is still a routine of tyrant and white flowers in love, and there is no need for so much production in the natural market, especially in the first two years, the online policy does not promote brainless love with artificial saccharin. Many high-concept settings are designed to affect the life of the protagonist, so that the characters have a deeper thinking about life and life, but some screenwriters' skills can only float on the surface of sweet pets. Xiao Jiu, the executive producer of a film and television company, told Xiaoyu.
She believes that high-concept dramas should have a deeper thickness.
Is the next stop in a high-concept emotional drama intergenerational relationship?
The thickness of the story is not enough, it is simple artificial saccharin, the project volume cannot be expanded, and the cost performance is not high, which also leads to the high-concept romance gradually losing its position in self-made dramas and sinking into the account-sharing drama track. In addition to the 10-minute episode of account-sharing Chinese dramas, which are filled with a large number of sweet pet dramas with high-concept gimmicks, the inspiration brought by "Twinkle Twinkle Twinkle Star" has made account-sharing dramas continue to give birth to high-concept themes such as "Different Mr. Xiao", "He Came Across the Mountains and Seas", "Please, She in the Body", and what is even more rare is that in some dramas, romance is no longer a single highlight.
Last year's iQiyi account-sharing drama "He Came Across the Mountains and Seas", judging from the title of the play, is very much like a romantic drama with dry seas, but in fact, the plot is that the son traveled to his mother's high school days to help him rebuild the family atmosphere in order to make up for his girlhood's love regrets when his mother was old.
"A Family of Three" in "He Came Across the Mountains and Seas"
"I traveled back to be classmates with my parents", many people are already familiar with it in "I Don't Want to Be Friends with You", and the movie "Hello, Li Huanying" and "Riding the Wind and Waves" are also used in this setting, and further back, the Japanese movie "Blue Sky Thunderbolt" and the Hong Kong film "New Difficult Brothers" are also telling some family stories based on this classic model.
This kind of story puts a lot of highlights on the family line, which not only enriches the emotional dimension of the story, but also covers the silver-haired group in terms of audience.
The account-sharing drama "Please, She in the Body" recently broadcast by Tencent Video is another high-concept approach outside of time and space travel - soul reversal. In the past, many soul reversal settings would be used in the confrontation between the male and female protagonists, such as the confrontation between the suspect male protagonist and the criminal police female protagonist in the Japanese drama "Heaven and Hell", the reversal of the rich second-generation male protagonist and the ordinary female protagonist in "Reverse Life", and the "Metamorphosis" that focuses on social identity and gender contrast.
The grandparents and grandchildren in "Please, She in the Body" have their souls reversed
And "Please, She in the Body" is similar to the Japanese drama "Father and Daughter Seven Days Change", focusing on the soul reversal between intergenerational relatives, and the story is also upgraded to relatives who originally did not understand each other, and after the soul reversal, they put themselves in each other's shoes to understand each other's position, and then get back together.
Executive producer Xiao Jiu told Xiaoyu that Youku opened a "Silver Hair Theater" this year, and the preferences of the silver hair group are valued by the platform, and the corresponding content demand will definitely increase. On the other hand, it may be difficult to ask many screenwriters to write strong reasoning and hard science fiction high concepts, but family and friendship are still within the scope of emotional dramas that Chinese screenwriters are good at, which is more suitable for screenwriters to play.
A buffer from fantasy to hard sci-fi
The combination of high concept and emotion is the most suitable mode for Asians to watch movies, but in the understanding of executive producer Xiao Jiu, such a theme still belongs to the exclusive practice of medium and light dramas. For example, the model of account-sharing dramas can reduce the risk of the platform and allow the brave filmmakers to make bold attempts.
For filmmakers who want to have more in-depth cooperation with the platform, it is necessary to consider how high-concept dramas need to dig deeper and make more innovative directions.
The story of the high-concept suspense drama "Off the Rails" begins with a mysterious mobile phone
Xiao Yun, a business manager of an IP operation company, said bluntly, "There are many companies that ask about high-concept IP, but there are very few people who decide to buy it in the end." Zhao Xiang, the planner of the film and television company, also said, "The platform is actually welcome to high-concept projects, because it is easy for you to explain the selling point of the story clearly in one or two sentences, but the platform now has higher requirements for the quality of the project, and we will find it difficult to develop what depth and maturity we can develop." ”
Zhou Hao, the producer, producer, and founder of the high-concept youth drama "I Don't Want to Be Friends with You", also has similar ideas, "If you just use the high-concept to travel back to the past, just to re-fall in love, I think this kind of bridge is too much in the current short drama, the threshold is very low, and it is not very meaningful, and there are already 10,000 ways to travel back in love in the short drama." ”
What can be easily done in short dramas, if long dramas or movies do something similar, it's not really necessary, if it's like "The Beginning" to the point where the logic and rhythm are very tight, it's worth doing.
Zhao Xiang believes that this difficulty lies in the creation of the script, not in the production level. If the filmmakers don't challenge hardcore sci-fi, the amount of special effects used in high-concept dramas is still relatively small, and it will not have much impact on the production schedule and budget.
The difficulty at the script level usually lies in the field of crossing emotional themes, and when the high concept is combined with a relatively strong genre combination such as suspense and soft science fiction, the elements that need to be combined will bring difficulty. For example, in high-concept suspense romance dramas such as "Dark Clouds Meet the Bright Moon" and "Off the Rails", there is more of an incompatibility between suspense elements and love elements. or "Call from Time and Space", which is a remake of the Korean drama "Signal", has a very mature template for the plot, but it needs to be extra cautious in dealing with public security personnel and methods to solve crimes.
In addition to suspense, how soft science fiction shapes the world view of curiosity and how to justify the suspense brought by the new setting has not yet been handled well.
In "The Bionic World", there are people and AI androids living in a world where they are mixed
iQIYI's "Fog Theater" almost every year has a high-concept soft sci-fi suspense drama selected, the male protagonist was selected by a mysterious organization and entered the "dream loop" experiment to chase the murderer, "Fatal Wish", which mysteriously prevented the use of virus APP to manipulate human life and death, and "Bionic World", where AI androids and humans live in a mixed worldview, failed to grasp this scale. The bionic robot-themed high-concept drama "Hello, An Yi", adapted from the word-of-mouth American drama "Humans", also once adapted science fiction into an emotional drama, and it took nearly three years of backlog before it was distributed and broadcast on multiple platforms.
"It's true that because there are no good soft sci-fi success stories in the past, everyone is still very conservative about sci-fi themes. On the one hand, there are very few IPs like "The Three-Body Problem" that are national enough, and on the other hand, science fiction has no soil in China, and it is difficult to land audio-visual aesthetics and stories. Zhao Xiang thinks.
On the contrary, soft sci-fi in the name of fantasy adventure and infinite stream is more popular.
Fantasy adventures are more intimate to Chinese audiences because they have many Chinese elements stacked with worldview foundations, such as the "Taiyu Universe" series of IPs, which were pocketed by Tencent Video with sky-high copyright fees and decided to develop them one by one; Because of the promotion of many popular titles such as "Squid Game" and "Alice in the Dying Country", the infinite flow of the level has increased the audience's awareness of this type of theme.
Mango TV's adaptation of Cai Jun's novel "19 Floors" of the same name was broadcast in the Monsoon Theater, although because the number of episodes is too long and the plot is not compact enough and the Douban score is less than 6 points, it has been a breakthrough in the genre of domestic high-concept dramas. Tomato Novels' largest IP that sold film and television rights last year, "The End of the Decade", also announced this year that it will be remade by Ningmeng Film and Television.
"The adventure theme of Chinese elements has accumulated national popularity through the adaptation of IPs such as "Tomb Robbery Notes" and "Ghost Blowing the Lantern", and the adventure theme pays more attention to the shaping of group portrait characters, which is also very friendly to Chinese audiences who like to see the relationship between characters." Zhao Xiang believes that this theme may be a new direction for the next wave of high-concept dramas, and it is also a better buffer zone and trial zone before domestic dramas challenge hard science fiction.
Can the non-paranormal also expand the imagination of high concepts?
"High concepts are a bit stuck in the realm of fantasy and soft sci-fi." Planner Zhao Xiang told Xiaoyu that although these two types are the most intuitive to attract audiences, many producers will rely too much on this method and this kind of IP and lose their creative imagination.
If it is defined according to the primitive definition of high concept, which "can be explained in a simple and concise way with a plot in one sentence", the special genre of non-paranormal phenomena or dramas with unique selling points can also be regarded as a branch of "high concept".
For example, Youku's "White Night Theater" suspense drama "New Life" can be described as a crime story with poor information, the "Cocoon" series can be described as the story of a graduate student majoring in toxicology and entomology helping the police solve the case through insects, "The Lonely Beast" is a story of a second-hand store appraiser uncovering the wounds and healing the hearts of antique owners, and "Crime Hunting Guide" is a story about a portraitist helping the police chase the murderer by drawing a portrait of a suspect.
Excavating little-known niche professions is a common means of this kind of high-concept drama, attracting the audience's curiosity through occupations, and then satisfying the audience's curiosity through the protagonist's experience of different unit stories, then whether this kind of story can create enough spectacle determines the degree of excitement. As long as the above-mentioned dramas fall on the suspense theme, the broadcast effect or reputation are relatively outstanding, and Japanese and Korean dramas have been deeply cultivated in niche police departments for a long time, and the possibility of criminal investigation suspense dramas has been maximized through curious cases.
"Lonely Beast", "Time Agent", "Forgotten Time", "Dumb House" and other "mysterious shopkeeper puzzle solving" stories become a little bland once they are separated from fantasy and ability elements, the essence is that the screenwriter has insufficient control over the narrative mode of the unit story.
In addition to the crime suspense, the infinite flow of "19th Floor" and the fantasy high-concept drama "Forgotten Time" in the style of "No. 8 Pawnshop" are common practices in TV dramas.
The road fantasy drama "Summer Wonder Book", narrated by a best-selling female author and her publishing and editing partner, has the feel of a contemporary love fable, along the way the female writer tells different fantasy stories, the truth and falsehood are unknown, but romantic and curious, with the director's stylized audio-visual expression, the audience's experience is unique and fresh.
Novels, comics, plot threads and real events intertwine and overlap dramas, as well as "Twilight Heart" and the to-be-broadcast "Shadow Trace", "Summer Wonderful Book" superimposed on top of which the rare road movie practice of film and television dramas is the finishing touch, and the plot narrative is consistent with the director's expression in the audio-visual picture is a major difficulty at the production level.
"This kind of high-concept drama with narrative and audio-visual needs complements each other, which is a challenge to the existing film and television production process, and it is rare to find a director who is willing to do an imaginative lens language for a romantic drama, maybe a female director will have more such sensibility, and few producers are willing to take the risk of doing such a new theme challenge." Executive producer Xiao Jiu sighed.
Taking risks is a high-concept approach, but outside the play, more and more people dare to take risks in high-concept dramas. In the two years from "on fire" to "out of fire", high-concept dramas, like all other themes, still lack more imagination.
Zhou Hao, the founder, producer and producer of Tianhao Shengshi, finally sighed, "Now is an era of a hundred flowers blooming, and there is no theme to achieve the extreme, which means that there is still a lot of room for high-concept to play, and we just need to be braver." ”