Introduction: Youth is sometimes laughter, sometimes dark clouds.
The youth drama "Sky of the Wind Dog Boy", which premiered on September 24, 2020 and premiered jointly on Station B, has attracted much attention since its broadcast, and this article takes the acceptance of young audiences during the series on Station B as the background of the discussion, trying to find a new trend of the gradual integration of youth pop culture in the process of acceptance of film and television art works.
The youth-themed drama "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy" is adapted from Li Zelin's novel of the same name published in 2017, and director Zhang Yibai moved the school on the closed island in the original book to the center of Chongqing, and the time background was set until the beginning of the millennium.
The story takes the daily life of the four brothers of Daxing Village (Dog Brother, Dalijiao, Mimi, and Big Mouth) and transfer students Martin and Li Anran as the main clues, which not only shows the youthful atmosphere of school life, but also contains the helplessness of adolescents in the face of social problems and family changes.
As the first "solo drama" work after Station B entered the film and television drama industry, its youth culture core is highly consistent with Station B's own platform temperament.
From the perspective of the industry, this fit is the business strategy of Station B to vigorously advance into the film and television drama industry;
From the perspective of audience research, the introduction of "Wind Dog" by Station B provides us with an excellent example of studying youth pop culture, which is mainly reflected in the following two aspects:
First of all, the bullet screen culture of Station B can be more intuitive and faster to help researchers understand the interpretation of a certain plot or a certain phenomenon in the play by young audiences; secondly, through the understanding of the audience's emotions in the bullet screen, it can help creators better grasp the trend of youth culture, so as to produce film and television art works that can keep up with the pulse of the times and be recognized by young people.
The Fragile "Fourth Wall"
"Fourth Wall" is derived from the Western theatrical term, which refers to the traditional mirror-framed stage with three solid walls, and the one facing the audience is virtualized as the fourth wall, symbolizing the virtual boundary between the audience and the actors.
There are many classic works in film history that give the audience an emotional experience of communicating with actors on the screen by breaking the fourth wall.
For example, the monologues of the actors looking directly at the camera in "The Thief and the Silence of the Lambs"; or the shaking of the picture caused by the contact between the objects on the screen and the camera in "Killer's Kiss"; or the "Deadpool" behavior in "Anne Hall" in which the director completely ignores the fourth wall and begins to detach from the plot and the audience.
In the first five minutes of the first episode of "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy", the four brothers of Daxing Village looked at the sky together and shouted "After all, we are a youth film", and in the next few episodes, there was also a dialogue between the delicate parents similar to "You don't ask me the same question in every episode", if this way of relying on dialogue to push the fourth wall down is not much different from the previously mentioned movie. The dialogue that takes place in episode V between the two main supporting characters of Mimi and Big Mouth expands the semantics of breaking the fourth wall to some extent, and the short dialogue may be excerpted as follows:
Mimi "So what is my regret?" ”
Big mouth "Not yet you're a dead supporting character." ”
Mimi "Then I don't feel involved." ”
Big mouth "double male protagonist, double female protagonist, not counting our very normal thieth." ”
Mimi's supporting role can still have highlight moments. ”
Big mouth "Haven't arrived yet." ”
Mimi "How long has it been?" ”
Big Mouth" at least for episode six. ”
Mimi, "Do you know?" ”
Big mouth "You didn't read the script." ”
In the course of the series, the breaking of the fourth wall here directly served as a trailer. I don't know if it is out of special arrangement, there is also a ridicule of the director himself in the play, such as director Zhang Yibai shooting a movie in his own play, and the actor's dialogue "Youth is to have regrets, the director said that this kind of shooting is advanced."
This practice corresponds to the praise of the author Li Zelin through the mouth of the actor in the original novel, and it can also be regarded as the old tradition of "Wind Dog Boy / Mad Dog Boy".
The construction of a bullet screen culture
Although the way traditional cinema breaks the fourth wall is diverse, the audience cannot respond to this communication from within the screen in time, and such restrictions also create barriers to emotional communication on and off the screen.
Station B allows the audience to send a bullet screen while watching the video, such a movie viewing method solves the problem of one-way feedback of film and television dramas to some extent, it not only provides an instant feedback scheme for the audience, but also integrates the bullet screen sent by the audience in a rolling way, and finally forms a discussion community similar to the instant forum in different videos.
In this way, the "bullet screen" as a redundant object for watching movies can realize the reproduction of the meaning of video text. The cultural orientation of reproduction must be inextricably linked to factors such as the age, cognitive habits, and cultural level of the audience group.
In "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy", there will be "op" at the beginning of each episode, that is, the opening song, and the audience who chases the drama generally skips this link directly, but repeated clicks and drags will bring a bad experience to the viewing process, so some platforms have launched the "skip the opening" option.
The solution given by Station B for this situation is to add a hyperlink-like protocol to the bullet screen, which can jump to the specified time after clicking on the specified bullet screen. This kind of bullet screen is affectionately called "command" by netizens, and the audience's gratitude to these command points is to leave a bullet screen such as "small hand shake, op no" or "successful airborne landing, backhand blow up command" at the end of the jump to the end of the op.
In addition to the official bullet screen, B station netizens for the reproduction of the meaning of the existing sentence is also a major traditional art ability, "Wind Dog" in the dog brother (full name Tu Jun) and Martin are trapped by love, the two because of love and can not have a lot of common language, netizens in a timely manner in the bullet screen area left "old horse to know tu" such words, on the basis of the existing idioms to change the text to make it in a certain discourse space to produce new semantics, this kind of reproduction of semantics that is not limited to the past, is a unique landscape of youth culture, The bullet screen function of Station B provides a fertile ground for this kind of ridicule.
Similar cases in "Wind Dog" and when the actor's dialogue is not correctly understood, the "enterprise-level understanding" that appears in the bullet screen is not only full of young people's ridicule of the restrictions of enterprises in the current society, but also implies a bit of rebellion; in the early stage of the plot, the dog brother took her to find her big brother Liu Wenqin in order to be safe and happy, but did not know that the two were once lovers, and the font color in the bullet screen will be adjusted to green, representing the sympathy of netizens for the encounter of the dog brother.
The bullet wall, which is novel and rebellious at the same time, may seem like a cognitive barrier for people of other ages, but in the popular B station of popular culture, it has become a graffiti wall for young people to show themselves.
epilogue
The bullet screen in the film and television drama of the mobile platform not only provides the audience with an outlet for emotional venting in the process of watching the movie, but also jumps out of the original text semantics after gradually forming a scale, and together with the episodes, it constitutes a visual element that can be watched. Together with the series, the barrage provides an excellent example of interpreting youth culture.
As the original text, "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy" is destined to jump into this year's youth drama under the blessing of the bullet screen. The success of "Wind Dog" in Station B has brought inspiration to the industry not only in terms of creative experience, but also in the emphasis on the audience. Although this point seems very old-fashioned, it is not only a clichéd factor such as visual elements, dialects, and broadcast time, but also a real understanding of a group's lifestyle and cognitive model. Zhang Yibai did this, "Wind Dog" did it, and Station B also did it.