Author | Gu Han
Editor | Li Chunhui
In 2022, long plays are getting shorter and short plays are getting longer.
The former is mainly reflected in the change of set number. There are only 24 episodes of the costume drama "The Wind Rises in Longxi" that the stars joined and landed on CCTV, which was unimaginable in previous years. In pure online drama, the volume of about 20 episodes is becoming more and more mainstream. The story of the thrush was split into two parts: 22 episodes and 20 episodes. Think of those fairy tales with 50 or 60 episodes in the early years. It’s like a lifetime ago.
The latter is mainly reflected in the change of the duration of the single episode. At the beginning of 2022, the comedy miniseries "Aunt’s World" attracted attention in a single episode of about 5 minutes, while the recent well-known puppet miniseries "I am in ignorance" and "I haven’t seen my only daughter" doubled on this basis, with a single episode of about 10 minutes.These dramas seem to take a middle between the traditional long drama and the short drama, with a slightly longer single episode and horizontal screen shooting.At present, there is no official unified name, so let’s call it "Chinese opera".
Aiyou Tengmang did this in order to adapt to the viewing habits of long video users. However, just in the past April, Aauto Quicker also launched a "five-minute drama" wing-supporting plan, and put forward new requirements for production specifications in terms of access conditions, such as "shooting on a horizontal screen, with a frame width-height ratio ≥1.3".
This is not without warning. In this year’s Spring Festival, Aauto Quicker’s most famous ancient short play "princess royal is on" is the horizontal screen.
At the 2020 Watermelon PLAY Curiosity Conference, Ren Lifeng, president of Watermelon Video, put forward three characteristics of Chinese video: 1-30 minutes, horizontal screen and PGC production. Therefore, judging by the length of time, the "micro-short drama" that has been called for several years has already been on the road of Chinese video-even the shortest ones can have one and a half minutes in an episode.
The trend of horizontal screen and specialization makes this more clear. The micro-short drama that comes out vertically may ultimately rely on "horizontal" to truly adapt to the long-established habit of watching dramas.
Long video, an outsider in the video competition?
The video industry has had a hard time these two years. Both long and short videos have entered the stage of stock competition. Among Chinese video players, bilibili, the only one who didn’t work hard in vain, didn’t agree with the positioning of Chinese video at all, and stepped into the mire of burning money in content.
In this case, breaking the time limit and expanding the content ecology have become their common choice.According to the theory of high emotional intelligence, the boundaries between long, medium and short videos are becoming more and more blurred. To put it mildly, there are more and more behaviors of copying homework from each other:
Tik Tok has launched a web version of PC, and now it can publish pictures and texts in addition to videos. Aauto Quicker added barrage function after double speed. This year, bilibili is pushing for short video with vertical screen. The content of immersion, less processing and the way of sliding up and down are all like shaking fast.
Chinese video is a concept that gets hot at the first sign. In the first half of 2020, Quibi (bankrupt) Appeared in Hollywood, who wanted to do short plays in Netflix mode. Gong Yu, CEO of iQiyi, made judgments such as "the market potential of YouTube mode app will increase significantly in the next 2-3 years" and revealed that a new medium-long video product "Suike" was being developed.
In the second half of 2020, Watermelon Video, which has attracted much attention because of the long video action of bytes, announced that at least 2 billion yuan will be used to subsidize Chinese video creation in the coming year. In just one year, Chinese video has changed from a crowd to a crowd, and WeChat, Zhihu, Baidu … even Betta has followed suit.
Nominally, middle video is a cross boundary that appears when short video is long and long video is short. But in fact, the recognized Chinese video players are bilibili, Watermelon Video and even Zhihu. After all, short videos can be made into Chinese videos, and it is easier to achieve it by releasing the time limit. Only the long video platforms, although they have qualifications and resources, are always outsiders in the Chinese video competition.
Tencent’s short and medium video exploration started very early, and its street products reached double digits. Microvision will survive until now, and it will be integrated into the same business unit with Tencent Video. Iqiyi borrowed the east wind of "Youth has You 2" when it was first launched. However, it never formed a real creative ecology and failed to transform into a second-generation platform for its film and television dramas. After the wave of layoffs at the end of last year, it also merged with other products.
The reasons are as follows: First, the forms of entertainment are increasingly subdivided, and "Shake Fast B" have occupied the mountain of PUGC and fragmented entertainment. More importantly, PUGC’s long video is something that was once owned and actively eliminated. Long video has been on the road of professional content and payment mode for a long time, and now users want to go back and pick up PUGC, which users are neither used to nor expected.
In this way, the special features of Chinese drama are revealed.You don’t have to rely on ecology in particular, but you can operate it according to the drama series. It may be a rare opportunity for a long video to grab the initiative in the middle video.
Is the video still waiting to be defined?
It may be due to the fact that YouTube was taken as the control group from the beginning inside and outside the industry, and there is a ready-made bilibili for reference in China. It may also be because it is the byte system that has been keen to define and promote it, and Chinese video seems to have been deeply bound to PUGC mode.
When it comes to Chinese video, we will first think of VLOG, pan-knowledge content, film and television commentary/second creation, etc. However, this is not necessarily because of how well these contents fit with the Chinese video, but more likely because of the repeated collisions between Chinese video players, or between long, medium and short videos around these contents (such as wizard financial events), and the impression left over time.
How can a long video platform develop its video? In the past, the answer was basically to incorporate film and television commentary/second creation, so that the traffic of short and medium videos can be precipitated around the long video IP, which is typical for example. Instead of creating long-term content in a professional way that is familiar to long videos.
In fact, 1-30 minutes is the professional content that most viewers are familiar with: a cross talk or sketch, an animated cartoon, a sitcom, a MV or music scene, a segment cut by a TV station with advertisements …
In other words, the long video platform has a lot of professional content of medium video length, and even the single episode of many online dramas in the early years is about ten or twenty minutes. Only in a specific period, 40-60 minutes showed a greater advantage, so that this specification was eliminated, or at least marginalized in live-action dramas.
However, nowadays, when people’s time is further divided by short videos and patience is further eroded, 40-60 minutes of continuous watching becomes a kind of pressure. The volume of short and medium videos has become more in line with the demands of this audience.
Compared with the mini-short drama with a single episode of less than 5 minutes, the Chinese drama, which has doubled in duration, has a huge imagination space.
First of all, in terms of content, it can make the script more elaborate, no longer ups and downs, and the characterization is more delicate and free from stereotypes. On the whole, longer and more elaborate stories can also make Chinese dramas convey more different emotions and dig deeper themes beyond "cool".
On a more practical level, the realization of miniseries has always been a hot topic. Behind the occasional explosions, there are countless projects and teams with cannon fodder. This is the case in the period of "barbaric growth" of each content, except that the miniseries may have a shorter period and pay less.
At present, the monetization methods used in micro-short plays include advertisement implantation, brand customization (single episode, non-drama or whole play), leading actor’s delivery after becoming a talent through short play hit (limited to shaking fast), and content payment.
For the advertising model, the longer duration of Chinese drama undoubtedly gives more room for implantation. In the payment mode, the longer the duration and the more detailed the story, the better the chance for the audience to "willingly" pay for the Chinese drama.
In addition, telling the story well and IP-translating the content creativity instead of the actors may be good for long video platforms and non-MCN film and television companies that can’t adopt the mode of bringing goods by talents. In the barrage of "Oblivity", many netizens have expressed their desire to see this story expanded into a more excellent long drama. At first, the micro-short-drama brand rabbit-rabbit culture, which was invested by bilibili, also hoped to carry out creative testing and IP incubation through micro-short-drama.
This world, after all, is horizontal?
Hard Sugar Jun once thought that the micro-short plays of each platform may form distinct style barriers according to their respective interface design and audience groups. However, it seems that the specifications of micro-short dramas and Chinese dramas in the future may gradually become unified, or be stable in certain types. At least on the issue of horizontal screen and vertical screen, the trend has been revealed.
Yien Data: Insights into the Trend of Video Content in 2021-Micro-Short Plays
Why are micro-short plays and Chinese plays slowly falling to the horizontal screen?
Vertical screen is the most commonly used specification of short video, and the main body of the screen is often very clear, with little information, which is consistent with the demand of short video to minimize the energy input of users. However, when miniseries want to overcome the commercialization problem, this pursuit cannot be changed, and it is necessary to seek specialization and quality upgrading, so that the audience can adjust their psychological expectations from casual viewing to serious input.
Horizontal screen is the most widely used specification in traditional film and television, and it will look more like professional content than short video. Secondly, the format of movies and TV series has evolved many times, but the overall trend is to broaden horizontally, which fully proves the superiority of horizontal screen over vertical screen in storytelling-it can accommodate more information, and can assist narrative through depth of field, scheduling and other skills, making the picture look beautiful and textured.
More importantly, the same horizontal screen specifications as traditional film and television are more convenient for traditional film and television practitioners to transition to the creation of micro-short dramas and Chinese dramas.Looking back at the early reports of miniseries, there are many film and television practitioners who are unfamiliar with the balance between vertical screen and short video rhythm, and the performance of miniseries is not as good as that of short video MCN.
When the long video platform collectively came to an end and pushed the horizontal screen specification, this problem was no longer a problem. Some traditional film and television companies familiar to the audience, such as Huayi Chuangxing, Jiaxing Media and Wuyuan Culture, have all come to an end. Last year, Fang Guoyun Culture, the producer of "Who’s the Murderer" in Fog Theater, was revealed by Ren Xiaofeng, the chairman of the board, at the industry forum that the company currently has as many as 30+ short drama projects.
Sitting on the tuyere<念念无明&会成为“昙花一现”吗？丨导演曾庆杰专访》
A more realistic situation is: on the connection with traditional film and television companies, on the "distance" from the main force of drama chasing, on the operation and announcement ability of drama series, after all, the long video platform is better.
In Q1, 2022, Mango TV’s "Ignorance" achieved a total broadcast volume of 510 million, and Tencent video’s "Please! Don’t spoil me has 450 million plays, both higher than the 420 million in Aauto Quicker’s station TOP1 and the 310 million in Tik Tok’s station TOP1. For the first time in the field of short drama, the long video platform overtakes the short video platform, and the market structure has quietly changed.
Back in 2018, Life Began on Me, which was broadcast on iQiyi, provoked the topic of short drama with vertical screen for the first time. However, the long video platform did not match the vertical screen and the length of one minute, and Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok got the first bonus of short drama, which gave the first definition of short drama.
Will this situation be reversed in 2022? If one day the long video successfully takes the lead in short drama, will it be a blessing or a curse for short drama?
