Stills from "North and South".
At the 2020 network roundup "Talk Show Conference", actor Qin Hao complained to himself: "Which show I go to now, I have to tell the program team, 'One does not climb the mountain, two does not take pictures, three does not sing "Little White Boat", have ambition, right? But the director of the program group said to me at that time: 'Brother Hao, if you want to say this, then we can only change people.' ’”
This "Zhang Dongsheng", who came down from the cliff of the network custom drama "The Hidden Corner", sang a song "Little White Boat" all the way to the big stage of the 2021 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. From the self-entertainment of self-produced dramas on small-cost online platforms to the Spring Festival Gala, this is undoubtedly an important signal that the quality of online dramas has been upgraded, word of mouth has gone out of the circle, and attention has gradually mainstreamed.
In recent years, after the film and television industry has made the box office soaring and the market scale expanded, the industry capital has gradually cooled down and encountered a "cold winter", and the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2020 has made the film and television industry worse. Affected by the epidemic, the theater line was blocked, the shooting work was stalled, and the entire industry almost entered a frozen state.
At the same time, the public's consumption habits have quietly changed, and the online platform has almost become the only movie exit at that time - the network of film and television should be transported to take over, intensive cultivation, fast horse whip, quality upgrade. For a time, the pattern of the entire film and television industry has quietly changed.
Famous directors "going to the sea" were scolded, and established film and television companies continued to pour in
"This is Feng Xiaogang's version of 'Little Times'." "Strong with the stock of Beijing cavity poverty, this is the Beijing version of "Small Times", right?" "Leave it here in parallel universes?" How come I have never seen such a rich world? "In this drama, everyone has a villa, everyone has a floor-to-ceiling window, and I am the only one in Beijing in 996."
Director Feng Xiaogang "went to the sea" directed the first web drama - "North And South" just broadcast the first three days, Douban has not yet opened the score, netizens will be unceremoniously spray on the drama.
"1997 is over and I miss it." Many years ago, Feng Xiaogang single-handedly created the Chinese film New Year file with the box office of "Party A and Party B" with a box office of 37 million yuan, and this year's urban women's web drama "North and South" was tragically waterloo, sprayed by netizens, and the Douban score was only 5.0 points, far lower than the surreal fantasy suspense network drama "Si Teng" in the same year. Feng Xiaogang, an "old cannon" who is known as a "poisonous mouth", has been in the film and television circle for many years, and has not been soft in front of the media, this time in front of the bombardment of netizens.
This is an online quiz faced by the 63-year-old Feng Xiaogang.
However, no matter how "sinister" the jianghu is and how sharp the comments of netizens are, in 2021, there are still a large number of well-known directors and actors who have followed and announced their entry into the online drama market: Huang Jianxin directed the web drama "Whale Riding in the Four Seas", Chen Kaige supervised the web drama "Outer Eight Elements", Guan Hu filmed the web drama "The Yellow Skin Tomb of the Ghost Blowing Lantern", and You Dazhi directed "Heartless Mage 2". In addition, Zhang Ziyi of "Shangyang Fu", Zhang Zhen of "Chen Xi Yuan", and Tang Wei of "Daming Fenghua" have entered the online drama market.
Although it has become a fact that many filmmakers have helped shoot online dramas, market feedback and word-of-mouth ratings are the rules of the game. Instead of squeezing into the circle and getting the ticket, the audience will give you the score on the movie to the web drama as it is; the famous directors and actors, the audience does not like it, and still will not buy it.
"The first 6 minutes don't look good, they'll fork in the top right corner and turn it off." This seems to be a conventional rule of online film and television - no matter what is filmed, you must place the big scene in the first 6 minutes, and be sure to "ignite" the audience in these 6 minutes. It seems that as long as there is a spectacle of those 6 minutes, the number of network hits is half won.
Compared with the habit of watching cinema movies that audiences cannot refund tickets in the middle, the exit threshold of online film and television is too low, so if online film and television wants to retain the audience, it must hammer the content. In such an era where elites and grassroots coexist, and mainstream and marginalized coexist, there is indeed a strong and close two-way relationship between producers and online film and television. No matter who the producer is, when he comes here, the hero does not ask about his origin, he has to go through a small test of the market.
Stills from "You're My Glory."
No longer on the edge, positive mainstream is king
Feng Xiaogang once revealed to the media the reason why he took over the shooting of online dramas: if nothing else, only because the platform side found him and said, "Online dramas do not have a cumbersome review process like film production, resulting in being forced to delete materials, and the director has greater freedom to express." So he was convinced.
Nowadays, more and more filmmakers have entered the online drama market, which has also eliminated the values of the online drama market to a certain extent; in addition, the exquisite cinematic picture is the screen embodiment of this trend. "The narrative of the network sense, the picture integrated into the sense of the movie", this is the overall evaluation of more and more people on the web drama in 2021.
In 2021, the domestic film and television industry ushered in a comprehensive recovery. Judging from the latest industry statistics, in 2019, the effective playback of new feature films on TV drama episodes was more than 20 billion times more than that of online dramas; by 2021, the effective playback of new dramas on TV dramas was exceeded by nearly 20 billion times by online dramas - online dramas seem to be fighting a gorgeous turnaround battle.
"As an increasingly mainstream literary and artistic landscape, online dramas should mature in the spiritual core." Online drama producers should think more about how to show the vast picture of contemporary spiritual life and how to inherit excellent Chinese culture in a subtle way. Chen Shaofeng, deputy dean of the Cultural Industry Research Institute of Peking University, said, "At this stage, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the pattern of network dramas, and with the ultimate sense of 'out of the circle' of network dramas, we must think more about how to complete the spiritual core." ”
On the Douban page of the web drama "You Are My Glory", there is a short comment that has received 8889 likes: "Yu Tu, the ideal husband in the perfect system; people live to fall in love with Yang Yang repeatedly at different ages." ”
In the Douban group of this drama, in addition to expressing their love for idols, netizens also discuss the characters themselves and recognize the three views of the characters. This reflects the netizens' improvement and affirmation of the quality of the web drama of "fast forward and easy exit".
"You Are My Glory" was defined by netizens as "pink realism", and the idol drama plus a little realism plot was an important factor in the success of the show and was not marginalized. Although the Douban score of the drama is more polarized - some netizens think that its plot is close to reality and can empathize with it, and some netizens think that its drama is relatively simple and easy to understand, and there is no other suspense web drama, but the common evaluation of netizens is that the details of the drama are quite in place.
For example, when the male protagonist Yu Tu said that he was thirty, he reviewed his QQ information, and the corresponding information was true and effective, and even netizens "pulled out" the details of Yu Tu's forum account and WeChat group name. For a time, netizens conducted many in-depth studies of the drama. This can be said to be a big step forward in the orthodoxy of online dramas in the new era.
In addition, from an official point of view, in 2020, online dramas began to participate in the Shanghai TV Festival Magnolia Award and the China TV Drama Feitian Award, which also marked the formal unification of the evaluation mode of TV dramas and online dramas.
Stills from "Si Teng".
"Reduce the amount and improve the quality", by word of mouth out of the circle
With the addition of mainstream directors and actors such as Feng Xiaogang, Chen Kexin, Zhou Xun, Zhang Ziyi, and Guan Hu, Wangsheng Film and Television has also more and more got rid of the stereotypes and labels of "shoddy manufacturing" and "low cost", and gradually accelerated its upgrade from the aspects of picture texture and script feedback, close to the mainstream.
Among the top 20 lists of effective serials released by Yunhe Data in the first half of 2021, there are 13 online dramas. However, at the same time, the number of its online products is also gradually decreasing, and "reducing the amount and improving the quality" and creating a new high reputation are the common strategies and goals of the current online film and television platforms.
In August 2021, the list of key enterprises and key projects for national cultural export in 2021-2022, jointly identified by the Ministry of Commerce, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, was announced. The TV series "Qing Yu Nian", adapted from the well-known online novel IP, appeared on the list, and its overseas distribution operation was awarded the 2021-2022 National Cultural Export Key Project.
Overseas video websites not only purchased the broadcast rights of fantasy urban and double male protagonist costume dramas such as "Qing Yu Nian", "Si Teng", "Shan He Ling" and so on, but also the popularity of the two dramas "Si Teng" and "Shan He Ling" on YouTube also continued to rise.
Foreigners are not only fascinated by Chinese online texts, but also by Chinese online dramas. The foreign audience who chased the drama like crazy left a message: "I knew that I would have studied well Chinese." "Now I finally know why my mother asked me to learn Chinese." After experiencing the torture of "zhou geng" alternating between "raw meat" and "cooked meat", foreign countries have blown up a tide of learning Chinese, and this new Chinese trend has come because of the popularity of online dramas.
It can be seen that the decrease in the number of online drama declarations does not mean that the audience's demand for watching dramas has decreased. The explosive online dramas exported overseas also confirm that "reducing the amount and improving the quality" and emphasizing content and quality are the roads that online dramas should take.
Nowadays, online film and television dramas have become a must-have chat topic in the pantry. Colleagues recommend each other to each other's rice dramas, and exchange lipstick numbers of the heroines of new dramas in WeChat groups, which has become the daily routine of netizens who follow dramas. This shows that the distance between online film and television and cinema stations is being narrowed.