Don’t sing new species so quickly.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “drugs” (ID: youhaoxifilm ), the author He Runzhen.
As one of the strategic products used by Long Video to defend against short videos, the vertical screen drama seems to have become a “paradox” this year: in the next step, it does not have the short video threshold of those more nipples, a step forward It can’t be a real episode in a short time.
In addition to the early generations, “Life has started with me”, it continues to be hot, and other works don’t seem to be too big.
The “My Boyfriend Sister” in the first batch of vertical screen dramas last year was less than 8.23 million in the Tencent video station. Yunhe Data did not even include this work; another August this year’s “Stop!” Guan classmates, although the number of broadcasts in the station exceeded 28.5 million times, but more than three months have passed, Douban has not yet opened. So some people began to sing the industry: vertical screen drama, born in 2018, died in 2019.
“Stop it! Guan classmates, Douban has not been opened yet, only 63 people want to see
But it also clearly provides some new accessibility for the industry: for example, in the just-on-line “Life for me 2”, the interactive video feature is used, according to official data, there are more than 95% Users have chosen to use the interactive option. Coincidentally, just recently, social application Tinder has just launched the first person vertical screen interactive drama “Swipe” on his own app.
According to the East and West entertainment reports, users can use Tinder’s iconic “left and right sliding” to choose the plot within 7 seconds. This six-episode episode will create the “Ethical Dilemma” option many times, and users can promote the development of the story according to their own preferences. The vertical screen drama seems to have an infinitely novel imagination space.
And the drug sputum (WeChat ID: youhaoxifilm) also found in the interview that although the vertical screen drama has not yet become a climate, if you look at it from a higher latitude, you will find that this is actually a long video platform to seize the short video track. A placeholder game: Compared to the creative vibrato, fast players, long videos are still better at making quality stories, and the plot screens with plots are just their advantage track. From this perspective, the video platform is actually methodicallyMarching on the beach.
The vertical screen was killed in 2019? The answer may not be the case.
Yellow screen year
In November last year, it was the time when the vertical screen drama had just started.
Spring Breeze and Iqiyi launched “Life to Me”, which became the first vertical screen drama in the first year. In the first month of the broadcast, starring Spicy Yoko, he boarded two microblogging searches. Other platforms have keenly smelled the good atmosphere of the vertical screen, and they have begun to layout.
The life is on me, the two seasons are passed.
Tencent video launched short dramas such as “My Boyfriend Sister”, “Meng Chongjun”, and the hot pot video (original yoo video) directly played the slogan of “the first vertical screen theater in the whole network”, providing users with the slogan. Including “My second boyfriend” “Princess sick nemesis” more than ten kinds of vertical screen drama. Youku launched the “Refueling Sisi” project in August this year. The main lineup comes from well-known works such as “Shameful Iron Fist”, “Xihong City’s Richest Man” and “Chinatown Detective Case 2”.
In November of this year, “Life” was launched in the second quarter. According to Yunhe data, there were two days in the week when there was a lyric episode in the whole network. Being able to stand out from the fierce competition, it is no accident to the spring breeze.
Before this, they have already had a lot of experience in making short videos. They have produced such works as “Deep Night Canteen”, “Deep Rain and Rain”, “Falling Pearl” and “Longitudinal Raiders”. The Spring Breeze screen also has two studios with spicy eyes and Liu Beishi as the core to produce short video content. At present, only the hot-eyed Yoko and Liu Bei-Shi have more than 6.5 million fans and nearly 50 million likes in the vibrato.
Spicy eyes Yoko and Liu Bei actually have more than 6.5 million fans
Therefore, when I started doing Life, the team had some basic methodology for vertical screen content.
The director of Life, Li Yafei, introduced in the interview of the bones: In order to meet the viewer’s habit of watching the screen for many years, I have to find a horizontal screen in the vertical screen.The information area, that is, puts the key information in the area of two-fifths of the top of the mobile phone, and designs this part into a horizontal screen of 16:9; in order to simultaneously present the facial expressions of the two groups of characters, the team also referred to the comic form. Split screen settings make the picture information density higher.
In addition, Li Yafei and executive producer Wenbo all mentioned that the time control of the vertical screen drama is also very important. In order to meet the scenes of the people watching the mobile phone with one hand, the vertical screen drama is generally 5 minutes. about. This is also the mainstream time of the current vertical screen drama.
Compared with technical methodologies, the outside world may be more concerned with narrative techniques. Zhang Jian, the producer of “Life” series and the CEO of Spring Breeze, told the drug lord. On the whole, the drama structure of the vertical screen drama is similar to that of traditional film and television works. The general climax event will appear in the plot 2/3, but because of the overall length Short, sometimes in the 1/2 position the audience can accept.
The “Life is on me” stills
But because the vertical screen is completely blank, and “Life” is a comedy theme, in many cases, it is more necessary to “hang” (communicative terminology refers to the impromptu performance of the actors according to the actual situation of the performance).
At present, the vertical screen drama is mostly based on comedy, so improvisation is particularly important. In order to create a “hanging” atmosphere, Zhang Jian specially prepared a space for reading scripts in Tongzhou. In this nearly two hundred square space, directors, actors, and screenwriters read and rehearsed. “There are languages, some are actions.” Some of them are eyes that you go to the right, the director must insert the picture through the encirclement.”
The filming of the first vertical screen drama “Mr. Lipstick” will be released at the end of this month. The fact that the vertical screen and the horizontal screen are similar from the content itself, but the vertical screen drama has higher requirements for actors. Because the scene is smaller, “horizontal screen may give you extra points, but the vertical screen has a limited scene, because the horizontal screen can make people shoot very small, and the scene is very beautiful. Vertical screen More is to shoot people, so the acting skills should be more prominent.”
In this regard, the recent “Life 2” tried to make some breakthroughs in the scene, hoping to let the audience quickly enter the scene through the scene.
“Yangzi is 95, we want to reflect some of the pain points experienced by this girl in the relationship. I talked about a dozen fine arts, and the words are also very clear. I said that I need a relatively large color block. A little, brighter,” Zhang Jian said.
According to the background data of the first season of “Life”, this series of audiences are women from 18 to 20 years old.The Lord has paid more attention to emotional life, so the theme of the second season has also become a love story between Yoko Yuko and different boys.
The audience is dominated by women in their 18s and 20s (data source public iQiyi Industry Express)
“If you have skills, the only trick is to let the audience enter the show for a second, because there is not so much time to explain the predecessor. It is a second you see this color, this room, you know the moment (the protagonist ) What kind of mood is what kind of thing is about to erupt.”
A “pseudo air outlet”
A slightly embarrassing fact is that although there are quite a few companies that enter the vertical screen, after one year, the only real work is the “Life”. In the same period of “Life”, “My Second Boyfriend” played a single episode on the hot pot video with a maximum of 8.554 million, but the number of people who liked it was only 322, and the number of official account fans was less than 1200. Other non-head works are even less popular, which also makes many people think that the vertical screen drama is a pseudo-wind.
But Jian did not agree with this conclusion. In his opinion, many people did not want to know what they were going to jump in. The content did not work well. How do you expect the wind?
“Singing bad is not a bad thing. It is really a process of elimination. There are always people who like it. There are always people who experiment. There are a few friends, I also talked about it. They started their first work is the work they want to send to the platform. I am very worried.”
There are some minor messes in this industry. Previously, according to the cat and movie entertainment report, another vertical screen drama “The Scenes of the Curtain” actually encountered an unexpected incident in which the editors ran off. The drama not only cut the hard-skinned students into pieces, but the editor did not say hello. Can only be directed by the director.
The Curtain of the Curtain
This vertical screen drama has been one of the epitome of the industry: seeing the vents, everyone rushed in and finally ended in disappointment, the pot is the vent.
An industry insider said in an interview that most people in the market are now watching and feeling strong.Look at how much money the platform can sprinkle, and focus on doing content. “It is not a production return that is purely invested in money. There are definitely people who can make money on the platform algorithm, but such people must be a minority.”
As a platform, Ideo’s studio general manager Fu Tuo also told the drug lord that many people regard the vertical screen as a financial product and ask him how much the return ratio is. This is logical for the content industry. There is a problem. “I have been asking the content industry for a long time. I have invested two million in this matter. What do you think is the return ratio? Most of the film and television industry is not profiteering.”
At the same time, another fact has been neglected by people: compared to online dramas, nets, and nets, the vertical screen is still very young. According to QuestMobile’s data, the total user usage of short videos in the first half of 2017 is about one-fifth of online video, and the basic level is not achieved until the first half of 2018. The vertical screen that was born out of it is still under the age of one.
Shi Jie, the director of Mr. Lipstick, told the drug lord that in addition to the head-up drama such as “Life”, most of the vertical screen dramas continued to be on the platform in August this year. The first wave of data has not yet I got it, and now it’s too early to say that the vertical screen drama is dead. He knew that the “Daily Girl’s Daily Life” made by another company in Hangzhou did not get the data.
This vertical screen show currently has more than 114,000 likes on iQiyi. At present, the film industry has just launched the “Aurora Project”, a series of investment and research and development for the vertical screen drama, and will soon produce a costume comedy, and cooperate with Wanhe Tianyi in a soft science fiction drama.
“Dream Girl’s Everyday” harvests 114,000 likes in iQiyi
“This market is the 28th principle. Some people always do well. Some people can’t do it. We think it’s still focused on content. If it’s just to make quick money, the vertical screen is good for all the vertical screens. Big, many companies will be eliminated sooner or later,” Shi Jie said.
From a business perspective, Futuo did not feel that the vertical screen drama “big limit” has arrived: on the contrary, it has a more complex possibility. Because the vertical screen drama can be paid and implanted like a drama, and can be named like a variety show.
The first season of last year, “Life” has been profitable. At the beginning of this year, “Director has started with me” has also achieved the double name of “Contec” and “Drip”, and is currently broadcasting “Life 2”. Already have the title of “Island” in the love community, there are still new advertisers who want to continue to enter. As far as information on drug lords is concerned, one cost isTwo or three million vertical screen dramas, if the investment is successful, the profit rate can even reach 400% (before the platform and the production company split accounts), which may be higher than the profit of another newly emerging category.
The director has started with me
In the view of Futuo, this is the investment attraction brought by the new content form. “Looking at a product in a horizontal screen is actually small, only suitable for the screen of the TV. But in the case of a vertical screen, some characters of this character are shaped. The things themselves are slowing down. You can see that the index effect here is very large, it is very novel for advertisers, and it is also popular in the circle of friends.”
New species and new track
When being sung, the “blow” often encountered in the vertical screen drama of childhood is “four unlike”: it is neither like a short video of pure pleasure, nor a long drama with rich plots, so Both ends of the standard seem to fail.
But the possibility of this new species is exactly what the long video platform needs: since entering 2019, the paid members of various video platforms have reached a stage of steady growth, and Tencent Video’s paid members in Q2 are stable at 9690. In the quarterly report of Q3, iQiyi showed that paid members increased by 31% year-on-year, down from 89% last year.
To bring more members, in addition to hoping for this wave of “private domain traffic”, the new content may be the key to inciting the second half. As early as 2018, Zheng Wei, vice president of Ali Entertainment, said that the competition of video websites has entered the final stage. If the product form is not updated, it is equivalent to writing eight shares.
Aiqiyi Q3 paying members increased by 31% in 2019
Aiqiyi Q3 paid members increased by 89% in 2018
Based on the rapid development of short video, vertical screen content has become one of the directions for video platforms to overweight. However, the UGC and PUGC short video tracks occupied by the vibrato are the Red Sea. It is not wise to enter the game. The high-profile PGC and the short story have become the unique advantage of the long video platform, which is the vertical screen mentioned above.
This has become the consensus of video platforms. Gong Yu said at the Yiqiyi Yuexiang Conference last year that the vertical screen content will become the mainstream direction of the future. After the micro-view and Yoo video lost in succession, Tencent also used hot pot video to undertake a large number of short video content in its own station, and began to produce vertical screen drama.
The drug lord noticed that the two current support strategies for vertical screen dramas are slightly different from the vertical screen definitions. Iqiyi uses sub-accounting (previous 3:7 split, late 5:5 split). Tencent is similar to “buyout” (S+ level direct buyout, other according to the effective price per 10,000 vv); iQiyi works for 4-10 minutes, hot pot video is 1-10 minutes. For example, the “My Second Boyfriend” mentioned above has an average length of less than 2 minutes per episode.
The above-mentioned people also mentioned to the drug lords that in fact, Youku is the best in the history of short films, but with the many adjustments and personnel changes in Ali’s internal structure, the first batch of people have already left. Among them are Lu Fanxi, who has made “Old Boy” and “I Never Wanted”. The latter is the co-CEO of Netherland Film and the founder of Rabbit Cave Culture, focusing on new online dramas and online movies.
As a new species, the vertical screen shows a lot of accessibility. Interactive video is one of them. For example, in the second episode of “Life”, the “Drama” discussion of interactive drama shooting, designed a fake interactive node: users can choose to let the white guest “now say” or “over the meeting” Say, “But after the selection, the user will find that this is a fake interaction. No matter which choice, the white guest will say his line.
But it is precisely this kind of fake interaction that makes the user who discovers the truth unclear and will watch it repeatedly at this node. Since it is a vertical screen drama, the time cost of completing a selection is only a dozen seconds, which makes the threshold for repeated viewing by the user to be greatly reduced. This kind of gameplay solves the problem that the previous interactive dramas were interrupted and immersed to some extent.
“Ordinary dramas are not used to being interrupted because of the scene, but short video interruptions are very logical. It is very short, and the cost of interrupting a short content is very low, and the idea of interrupting is also Used to it,” Futuo said.
In this sense, the combination of vertical screen and interactive video is also the platform for the pioneers of innovation: the experience that can be verified on them can be copied into the larger series of long series and long variety. For example, the above-mentioned false interactions lead to true interaction, and the time cost of user interaction is reduced as much as possible.
Several platforms have released the standards for interactive video creation this year, and the project is gradually coming online, but as of now, there is no such thing as Netflix’s “Black Mirror: Pandas Niki”. For the exploration of interactive content, perhaps vertical screen drama will bring unexpected increases.
As long video platforms want to defend, the vibrato also wants to attack. After announcing the opening of 1 minute of shooting rights for ordinary users in April this year, Vibrato announced in August that it will gradually open up 15 minutes of video publishing capabilities. According to several interviewees, Vibrato is widely looking for partners such as vertical screen dramas.
At present, there are many vertical screen dramas produced by third parties. For example, the urban emotional mini drama “Taiwan is the first time” produced by Tianwei Culture, the official account has already received 990,000 praises. 321,000 fans.
Another “Detective Xiaoyu”, called “The Rule of Law” on the vibrato, often publishes some safe stories of self-defense and self-defense in the account. From the plot, it is very close to vertical. Screen play. Shi Jie said that this type of company around does not rule out the possibility of cooperation with short video platforms.
Detective Xiaoyu won 7246.1W on the vibrato
All are doing vertical screen dramas. Who will have more advantages in terms of length? Zhang Jian feels that this is actually a competition in two dimensions: long video pays more attention to the storyline, and short videos are more concerned about bringing goods.
“Watermelon is now doing things like iQiyi, Tencent, Youku, buying some long tail dramas, copyright dramas. But there is no such thing as vibrato, we also listened to them, his thoughts are very simple, I just want to do a show with goods. The vibrato is very clear about my position.”
As a long video platform, iQiyi is also very clearYour own style of play: After determining the track of the vertical film, aim at the two strong categories of vertical screen or vertical screen variety, and use the self-made head content such as “Life” to sample the outside world, content and revenue mode. After the move, it attracts more partners and eventually forms a pyramid model like online drama and online movies.
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Life has broken my hand
Futuo feels that the outside world still needs to give more time for the vertical screen drama, because compared to the online drama, the network, or even the online movie, its development time is too short, “the online drama its antecedents It is the Chinese TV drama market. Whether it is TV broadcast or webcast, it has been broadcast for more than ten years. The understanding and migration degree of users are also very natural.
But the vertical screen is a matter of two or three years of vibrating and fast-handed. It’s not that the short film can be evaluated like a web drama.
As a producer of content from the era of the Internet drama, Shi Jie is full of confidence in the future of the vertical screen drama. “Our online dramas we made in 2016 have already ranked third in the platform. At that time, there were not many online dramas. We think that short videos also have such a trend. The Internet has not reached the top, and the ceiling has been broken, so Good is always breaking through.”
Reviewing the competition of the domestic long video platform over the years, the variables are usually brought about by the explosions. Can the new content species bring about changes in the pattern today as the national explosions become more and more difficult?
At least, we should not give up on imagination.