The well-known mega-mega-bgm and special effects are not necessarily carefully polished products at first. Some are rough, some are sluggish, and only the creators behind them know which time they inadvertently touched and became the starting point of a popular tide.
Threshold: Everyone plays, and the operation is bound to be not difficult
Chinese internet world, more than 6 million people have become "princesses on the run" since May this year. It is a vibrato special effect called "Princess versailles", after the user shoots, the special effect will embed the face into a set of European princess costume images, in the image of the princess, running in the three-dimensional animation palace. In the special effects, the hairstyle, costume and background are slightly rough, but the magical qualities of grafting the human face into it just attract men and women to nest themselves into the image of the fugitive princess without burden and enjoy it.
The person who created this vibrato special effect is a post-80s chongqing person named You Yang, who has been engaged in the animation industry for more than a decade. Some special effects users, dominated by curiosity, found the "initiator" of the TikTok homepage and found that this was not his first work.
During this year's Spring Festival, You Yang released a face-changing effect of the god of wealth to send blessings, which was only used more than 800 times. This contrast is inevitable in youyang's view. At the beginning of the year, he just learned about the douyin special effects from the circle of the animation industry, and he thought of taking advantage of the Spring Festival to make the fortuna special effects, but the progress was slower, and the sixth grade was released. Similar special effects are not unusual in Douyin, naturally, the special effects of the god of wealth in the ocean are drowned out, and they have not attracted the attention of many people.
It's just another tepid episode, You Yang felt. Ten years of pioneering training, he has not been alarmed by this kind of thing. Previously, after graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he had twice drifted north to chase his animation dream, done promotional animation for real estate companies, and also made special effects for online movies such as "Big Hero Lu Xiaoyu".
After returning to Chongqing in 2018, he formed an 8-person animation studio. A group of young people, the technology is good, the pre-modeling, the post-mapping are relatively easy. For You Yang, who has just been exposed to short video special effects, the difficulty of doing special effects is not at all a technical problem, he is alone, groping for a few hours to get it done, and the fortuna special effects are done by himself. It was only because of the mediocre response that he was demoralized, and his output rate plummeted in the following months.
The turning point came in April of this year. At that time, You Yang wanted to separate the special effects from reality a little more. You know, the first few special effects are to add some embellishments to real-life people and the environment, "Fortuna" is embellished with hats and beards, "Gege" is made of clothes, and "Snow Warriors" use helmets. Now, for the first time, the "log knight" he was going to do stripped man from reality: a knight on a wooden horse, wielding a wooden sword, galloping through the forest, with only one face being the user's own.
Everything other than the face has changed, there are more stickers, and You Yang has to make the stickers simpler - not that the technology can't keep up, but considering the users, he wants to let more users' mobile phones move. Finally, both the knights and the trees look angular and slightly rough. However, the amount of hot use shows that people obviously prefer the strange feeling of this three-dimensional scene. With the rapid development of the Internet, people are no longer satisfied with simple virtual embellishments, but prefer a new experience that jumps out of life.
In a sense, the next popular "Princess versailles" concocted the "Log Knight", but the texture is more gorgeous, the knight becomes a princess, the horse becomes a run, the forest becomes a palace, and the camera's wandering is highly similar to the camera position. This time, it is even more popular, with the departure of many celebrity big v, the use reached more than 6 million.
You Yang once did chat emoji design for a while. Thinking of the popularity of being jokingly called "middle-aged and elderly emojis", he understands the source of people's enthusiasm for these special effects: novelty. Although some flowers and flowers and simple special effects memes are outdated for young people, for the elderly netizens who have less access to the Internet, these simple special effects memes can attract them, and this kind of middle-aged and elderly emoji has indeed brought the joy of life to tens of millions of netizens.
However, even if the technology is relatively simple, there are technical iterations of the special effects of youyang. The special effects of the "Hulu Boy Band" released in June are no longer simple one-way movements of characters, but dance performances with complex body movements on the stage. The dance is popular, picked with the help of the TikTok staff, plus it's just in time for Children's Day. This time, you were successful again.
These special effects are simple for Youyang, and for laymen, pre-modeling and texture rendering require a lot of technical foundation. This is difficult for both young and old. In general, it is impossible for a user to learn a lot of software in order to play a special effect.
"Every platform update lowers the production threshold, and I'm moving toward making it easy to get started like a game engine." A few months later, You Yang saw that his special effects users were men, women and children, and he knew that this expectation had been roughly met. When everyone can interact with others with a simple special effect, the gap between young and old, boys and girls can be eliminated to a certain extent.
However, he maintained his usual sobriety: curiosity is the hole that is filled in human nature, and when all the elements that can conjure up tricks have been studied, the point of renewal is more and more difficult to find. Will anyone like the next special effect?
Love beauty: Everyone loves beauty, and beauty can also be defined
Xiao Ai, the creator of the beauty special effects that caught fire in the same period, has already prepared for the rain. She doesn't mind if fans buy it or not. She exploded with makeup effects such as "bottle mask" on Douyin, and at the stage when fans are still using this special effect in large quantities, she has considered doing something different in advance.
In college, Xiao Ai taught himself photography and started a part-time job as a portraitist. It is very important to take pictures well, and it is equally important in the later stage, and young people who love beauty will require a lot of post-p makeup after taking photos. In the past few years, Xiao Ai, who originally did not wear makeup, also had the opportunity to deeply grasp the inner world of young girls in one contact after another, which makeup is popular, which face shapes and how to draw, she is very keen.
"I'm a person with anxious looks, and I don't know much about makeup, so I don't appear in the camera very often." After contacting Douyin, Xiao Ai found that on the Internet, there is no shortage of people like her, and the demand and gap are equal to amplified. At the beginning of this year, Xiao Ai, who was still a little transparent, tried to make a makeup he liked, "the eye distance is a little bit apart, the eyebrows are thicker, the eyelashes are shorter, the pink silkworm, the nose is blush, and a little baby fat is added..." After trying, the effect was good, and it was saved casually. She named the makeup "Sweet First Love."
After clicking To Publish, Xiao Ai slept. After waking up, Xiao Ai's vibrato received many private messages with similar content.
"Sister, you don't have to reply, but I still have to say that this makeup saved me, and I didn't dare to show my face before."
This private message comes from a girl of the same age as her, click on the homepage, and the selfie of "Sweet First Love Makeup" is her first face-revealing work. Little Ai, who studied abroad in Toronto, felt a huge excitement and surprise at that moment. She swiped down from the list of special effects use one by one, and then she was moved: many female users who had never shown their faces on the homepage also smiled in this special effect. Some of them are housewives who have been tired for a day, and some are village women who have just put down their farm tools.
"Sure enough, only girls understand girls," one user commented. The common need for beauty prompts these women, who are usually obscure, to free up their hands to show themselves. To make women who are afraid to show more confident, she did.
The popular "bottle mask" makeup effect is also an accident. At that time, Xiao Ai brushed a "milk mask" makeup effect on the Internet, and she wondered if replacing milk with a bottle would be more in line with the tastes of current girls. Just like the popularity of pure makeup and first love makeup, many people like the feeling of being young, cute and cute. This change has leveraged the popular snowball, and so far, this special effect is one of Xiao Ai's most popular works.
Catering to the mainstream aesthetic, it will always do well, and the makeup effect of Xiao Ai in the early days is more accurate to the trend. Sometimes, the makeup effect is too fancy, and someone will always ask to be restrained, so there is plain makeup, which is a special effect that looks like little makeup, but takes a lot of thought. In fact, the popularity of this makeup is also an aspect of mainstream aesthetics.
Recently, Xiao Ai felt that it was time to find another way to do something else. People have different understandings of beauty in different cultural contexts. For example, Europeans and Americans will think that freckles are good-looking, and Japanese girls do not care whether their teeth are neat or not. She felt that in addition to people's willingness to become beautiful, she wanted to do something experimental, maybe that was the new popular code.
"For example, the seven-year-old camera I made is essentially using the effect of baby fat to let people know themselves who have become fat." Under that special effect, someone really sighed, "It turns out that I look pretty good after I am fat." This is the effect that Xiao Ai wants, she not only wants to help everyone show beauty, but also hopes to use her own creations to influence fans, so that everyone can find more definitions of beauty.
Deeply familiar with human nature, but not led by human nature, the road of special effects creator Xiao Ai's blockbuster has a new starting point at any time.
Persistence: My style takes me further
Unlike Xiao Ai, most of the time, cover singer Wang Yumeng will let himself create within the expectations of fans. As a musician who started with a cover, most of the popular elements of a song are occupied by the original song, and the cover song can also be attractive, and the mystery is precisely in the personal style of the second interpretation.
She can sing songs in many languages, English, Korean, Japanese, and even the more niche Russian. In February this year, a Russian-language song from Kazakhstan, "Simba Baba Pubila", which was popular with her, was as soft and sweet as ever, which is her highly recognizable personal style.
"I spend a lot of time every day flipping through the comments of my fans, and from their feedback, I can know which songs are right for me and which ones are not." Dealing with fans a lot, she will not easily sing voices that do not meet the expectations of fans.
Coming from the coastal town of Weihai, Shandong, she has loved singing since she was a child. She has no training in the classroom, and her only acting experience is performing at school theatrical performances and sports events. In middle school, she liked to perform her favorite songs on the singing k software, and at that time she met many people with common interests and accumulated a certain popularity. Until the university contacted Douyin, Wang Yumeng relied on the style of her years of exploration, step by step slowly heated up.
Wang Yumeng spends a lot of time every day eliminating recorded singing segments. It seems that some people feel that if all the songs of the current fire are sung again, they are bound to be able to fire. In fact, she abandons many popular tracks every time she auditions, and finally presents the one she is most confident in interpreting and in line with the characteristics of her voice. This guarantees the quality of her work. "Those songs that are too thick and too affectionate, although they are very hot, are not suitable for me." She believes and relies on the judgment of her fans. "My fans know me, and if they click on the same song more than twice, I'm going to try it." In most cases, the works that this tacit understanding has brought are successful.
In 2020, Wang Yumeng graduated from university and has since embarked on the road of professional musician. Now she has the opportunity to meet professional producers, polish songs with recording teachers, and class learning has been included in the plan. And what she cherishes most is still the voice that millions of fans can recognize as soon as they hear it, and the style of the language that cannot be named. Keeping the style stable is actually taking care of your own feathers.
Resonance: We will always have a heart-to-heart connection
In the complex real world, the trajectory of some blockbusters that are popular among the crowd may not even be able to grasp the creators themselves.
"I only concentrate on creating, and it can be so popular, it is not something I can predict." Musician Ai Chen did not have an accurate answer to the reason why his song "Misplaced Time and Space" exploded at first.
Ai Chen from Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, majored in computer science. Long ago, he sang songs online and made friends who made original music. Many of the fans in the early music community were young two-dimensional creatures, and Ai Chen began to contact the two-dimensional and ancient styles at that time, gaining a lot of popularity. After becoming a professional musician, he came into contact with Douyin and has accumulated more than 3 million fans so far.
Ai Chen is often busy until the early hours of the morning or even all night, leaving an hour a day to listen to Internet hit songs and some demos. "Listening to more and more tired, now there are a lot of songs on the Internet, singing and singing are those few chords." In 2020, when he received the demo of "Misplaced Time and Space", he had a bright feeling.
He described the song's melody as "more than the 80s", the lyrics are not very rhyming, but there is a sense of picture, depicting the common scenes and emotions in youth love.
"Three words, can only say to yourself / look up and don't let the tears get out of control / Where there is a fate that can peak and turn around" Seeing this lyric, fragments of past love experiences came to his mind.
The sentence that touched countless people, "I blew the evening wind you blew, then we don't count as hugging each other", reminded Ai Chen of the tone of painful youth literature on the early Internet, implying the youth memories of a generation. In the end, Ai Chen changed the melody to a completely different tone from the original demo, dropping it by four and a half octaves. From the several singing styles he would have, he chose the one that was "more painful". The melody of the lyrics and the poignant singing style, this song resonates with many young people. In the Douyin comment area, the messages of countless young people have become the display area of "Contemporary Youth Pain Literature".
Next, some central media began to forward the adapted version, some of which were used for the theme of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and some for the theme of the Olympic Games. "I look up at the starry sky you've seen, through a hundred years of time and space to meet again, the smile before you turn around, I understand." 」 The melody remains the same, and the lyrics are grander. The Korean battlefield and today's China, China's first Olympic Games and the Tokyo Olympics, the editing of patriotic mv directly turned the "sense of picture" into a picture, dislocation, and truly became a large span of time and space dislocation.
When countless Chinese tears for it, the meaning of this song has completed a transformation of individual memory into the collective memory of the country.
Ai Chen felt that he was one step closer to his dream. And these things were not thought of at all when he was creating. At first, he felt that the popularity of "Misplaced Time and Space" was probably the emotion he poured into singing and the lyrics with a strong sense of picture, which could make his peers resonate with the memories of youth. The national touch outside the young people came a little suddenly.
During the Tokyo Olympics, the People's Daily used the song. The Olympic version of "Misplaced Time and Space", Ai Chen carefully watched it. In the adapted lyrics, he found the answer: we will always be in touch with each other.
More and more diverse filters, music, and special effects are being created for people to use. More and more people, as a result, have completed their self-expression in a faster way.
In this era when self-expression has become the mood and trend of the times, special effects creators such as You Yang and Xiao Ai, and musicians such as Ai Chen and Wang Yumeng are craftsmen who hide behind the scenes and silently support the expression of ordinary people's creative desires.
Behind the creation of the whole people, there are many skilled craftsmen such as You Yang, Xiao Ai, Wang Yumeng and Ai Chen, who provide a "background" for ordinary people to shoot short videos.
On October 15-16, Douyin launched a new IP "Douyin Beautiful and Wonderful Day and Night", which invited stars + Douyin masters to present a creator carnival for two consecutive days. It includes the Douyin Creators Conference, the Douyin Wonderful Day, and the Douyin Wonderful Night. With the theme of "Creation Makes Life Better", the Douyin Creators Conference will deeply display the creators' high-quality content and the interpretation of the latest platform information.
Welcome to the Douyin app to search for "Wonderful Day and Night 1015", book a live broadcast, and see more exciting content in advance
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Written by | Ma Qing