Text |Ahh
EdPrincipal
Each era has its own "spiritual horse killing chicken" and "emotional antidote".
At the moment when the magic BGM of short ** is endless, and the clamor of live broadcast with goods breaks through the tranquility, humanities programs have not been forgotten, but have become more and more dazzling in the era of fragmentation.
And Youku Humanities is the brightest star in the night sky.
"Round Table Pie" has lasted for six seasons, and on the basis of inheriting the mantle of "Qiang Qiang Threesome", it has superimposed humanistic background and innovative elements, and has now unwittingly become a classic IP in the Internet era.
Since the beginning of this year, Youku Humanities' program producers Luo Yuan, Yang Zhou, Zheng Yanfei, and Zhao Bo have also brought a series of well-known new programs to the audience. Programs such as "First Person Plural", "Voices", "Let's Have a Good Chat", "Why Not Candle Tour" and other programs are frequently recommended by the audience and ** on social platforms, and the classic quotations of the guests have also been screenshotted and popularized.
Attentive viewers will find that the "Youku Humanities" standing behind these programs has also gone through 11 years of ups and downs and is about to enter its 12th year.
From making classic programs around cultural figures, to boldly trying new perspectives and new forms of innovative programs, "Youku Humanities" has tried to amplify the humanistic spirit to the whole industry and even the whole society, and the mission of "warming all living beings with cultural people" has never changed.
Boutique products are repeatedly polished.
Draw a match, light a stick of incense, several guests sit around the table, and the topic begins. When it comes to excitement, Dou Wentao's body often unconsciously sits up straight, leans forward slightly, and his arms are naturally propped up on the table.
In many of the moments known as "famous scenes", the audience in front of the screen will be attracted by the witty words of the guests, and few people will notice the round table with tea sets and incense burners, although the name of the show is "Round Table Pie".
"What is the right size for a table for chatting?"It's a question that the audience has a hard time thinking about, but the production team has to think about.
After Zheng Yanfei joined the production team of "Round Table Pie", the original story about the table quickly reached her ears.
The original round table size was the largest, I remember that I used a diameter of 110 cm, and after repeated tests, it was reduced to 90 cm, and the slight changes that came and went were difficult for almost the team members and even the audience to notice, but Mr. Wen Tao always felt that it was not good, and did not adjust to the most comfortable chat state, until the follow-up continued experiment, and then the current size was set, the round table pie with a diameter of 100 cm.
The diameter of the round table determines the distance between the guests, and the distance will affect the closeness of the communication between people.
In 2023, when "Round Table Pie" and "Qiang Qiang Xing Tianxia" have become must-see cultural programs, many viewers have more or less planted the seeds of "watching cultural figures and going to Youku" in their hearts. But as this table tells us, "A lot of things that we have become accustomed to are actually hard to come by." ”
In 2012, Youku Humanities Channel was established, which was the first online ** platform focusing on humanistic content on the whole network at that time.
What is this concept?2012 is the period of alternating transformation of new and old media, most of the online ** platforms ended the early stage of UGC-based, piracy prevailed in the wild era, just ready to enter the PGC-based, self-made content industry reshuffle period, the platform's profit model is still unclear. At the same time, as smartphones gradually replace computers, the best habits on the user side are also shifting from PC to mobile.
When there is no reference, no experience, and the prospects of the entire industry are still uncertain, Youku has made it clear that it wants to do humanistic content.
In the following years, Liang Wendao's "One Thousand and One Nights", Chen Danqing's "Partial", Ma Weidu's "Guanfu Dudu" and other programs were broadcast on Youku one after another, and Youku's humanistic matrix was also formed. Thanks to the pioneer consciousness and bold decision-making at that time, Youku's humanities have developed so far and have grown into a distinctive symbol that distinguishes Youku from other ** platforms.
In the cultural celebrity universe of Youku Humanities, in addition to cultural celebrities such as Dou Wentao, Ma Weidu, and Zhou Yijun, who are already very familiar to everyone, with the addition of Cai Kangyong, Xu Zhiyuan, Zhang Yue and others in this year's new program, Youku Humanities' circle of friends list is still being updated.
In the past 11 years, from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to producing one boutique program after another, Youku Humanities has become more and more experienced in the production of humanities, but every creator in the depths will know: in the face of humanistic content, it is still the devout disciple who will strive for the size of the table.
Who is lighting the everlasting lamp of "humanistic content" in the era of fragmentation?
Luo Yuan, the producer of "Qiang Qiang Xing Tianxia", has always believed: "The audience of humanities programs is very loyal, as long as the content is good enough, they will always follow." ”
In the past three years, 15 of the humanities programs launched by Youku have a Douban score of more than 8 points. From the first quarter of 2016 to the sixth season of 2022, the Douban score of "Evergreen" and "Round Table Pie" is above 8 points;The results of "Qiang Qiang Traveling the World" are even more amazing, from the first quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2023, the Douban score is above 9 points.
On social **, screenshots of quotations from these classic programs can always be seen in the discussion forums of many hot topics.
To this day, there are still netizens who recommend the first season of "Round Table Pie" The episode "I don't want to go to work, how to break", in which the content discussed by the guests is also thought-provoking today. You will find that the concept of "cost of work", which has been discussed by everyone lately, was introduced in the first season of "Round Table Pie" in 2016.
Boutique humanities programs are like stars, whenever you find yourself alone in the shadow of a difficult situation, you will look up and find that they are always there. Science and technology are changing rapidly, and the economic cycle is ebb and flowing, but the energy transmitted by humanities programs always seems to pass through the cycle and illuminate you at the fastest speed.
What's the secret to a show lasting three, six, or even more seasons?
In Zheng Yanfei's view, the answer to the mystery lies on the mystery. "Taking "Round Table Pie" as an example, it is not the kind that relies on grand stage art and does not need complex post-visual effects packaging, it is a cultural program with content as the core and based on the views of guests, and different guests have different opinions on different topics, which are endless to talk about and never get tired of watching. ”
The topic of each episode of the program will first go through the prototype of the brainstorm of the program group, and then combine social emotions to screen out nutritious and valuable topics. In addition, the more advantageous point of Youku's humanistic content is that cultural celebrities like Dou Wentao have long been personal IPs with distinctive characteristics, and their existence itself is the best help for content.
Our best professional teacher is also Mr. Wen Tao. From Qiang Qiang to the present, he has always been the core creator of content. From setting the tone of the program, to topic selection, to matching guests, it seems to be in his heart. I remember that in the fifth season of "Round Table Pie", during the epidemic, Dou Wentao proposed to talk about pan-health issues such as "genes" and "diversity".
It was also from the fifth season that the production team of "Round Table Pie" began to deliberately expand new content dimensions such as "popular science content". Once again, the richness of the content of "Round Table Pie" has been enhanced.
Another program hosted by Dou Wentao, "Qiang Qiang Xing Tianxia", because it involves outdoor live shooting, the process of determining the topic is more complicated.
It's a very difficult show to film. Producer Luo Yuan said frankly.
What the audience sees is Dou Wentao and his friends playing in the mountains and rivers and chatting about the world, but what the audience can't see is that behind each episode of the show, team members need to do a lot of desk work. First of all, we look at the information, and then we have to go to various places in the early stage to find local people for pre-mining. Locations and people who are deemed suitable will be listed** and a shooting plan will be made, but the screening process will continue until the shoot begins.
In addition to flexible and changeable topics, the change of "perspective" is another key to Youku's humanities programs that can always innovate.
After doing humanities programs for a long time, Luo Yuan found that "in the past, many programs were dominated by men", why can't there be a program dominated by women to show the attention of intellectual women to their surroundings and distances?Soon, "First Person Plural", which focuses on the perspective of women, came into being.
In September 2022, the project was officially launched, and Zhou Yijun was invited as the initiator. Specific to the production of the program, the question also returned to "what to talk about" and "how to talk", Luo Yuan said that it was a "very long process". The topic of "sexual harassment" in the first episode of the program is relatively sensitive, but as a program that cuts into the perspective of women, the production team believes that it cannot be avoided.
In the show, we tell women how to avoid this kind of thing, how to protect themselves, and if we can help everyone solve practical problems, it is valuable. ”
There are many moments that need to be weighed.
Just as Youku Humanities follows the concept of "Humanities in People", the core of humanistic content is the word "people", and the word "people" is a balance. As a producer of humanities programs, you need to find a balance between cultural concentration and breadth of people, and between commercial demands and content ideals.
As a first-class content platform, Youku Humanities is an important medium connecting cultural figures and users, and plays the role of a bridge and window.
On the one hand, Youku has maintained a close and friendly cooperative relationship with cultural and cultural figures over the years, helping them spread their knowledge and insights more widelyOn the other hand, Youku Humanities is also always concerned about the changes in society and the changes in user needs, so as to respond to the concerns of users through the program.
A large part of the reason why the IP of "Round Table Pie" and "Qiang Qiang Xing Tianxia" has been able to do season after season, and why "First Person Plural" can invite Zhou Yijun to participate, is that a team atmosphere of "respecting creation and respecting creators" has been formed within Youku's humanities channel, which is reflected in the producer's body, that is, he has always maintained an understanding and respect for all cooperative cultural figures.
Almost every producer interviewed by the Hedgehog Commune said that he "learned more often from these cultural figures".
Dou Wentao, who loves to study, is a typical intellectual, has extremely high requirements for the program, and will never allow his program to make a typo;Zhou Yijun, a war correspondent, is an intellectual woman with a keen ...... of observation and thinkingThe knowledge that cultural figures bring with them is already a bonanza worth digging into.
In the process of producing a program, most of what the producer does is "understanding" and "stimulating".
"Understanding" is about communicating with cultural figures about what they care about, what they want to achieve, and what their difficulties areAnd "excitation" is to be clear about what content Youku wants to produce as a platform, and constantly collide with them with your own ideas, so as to give birth to new sparks.
The two sides have been able to work together for so many years because everyone's original intention is the same. Luo Yuan said.
Relationships between people can sometimes be like a chain of chemical reactions. In the programs that Youku Humanities has cooperated with Dou Wentao for a long time, Zhou Yijun is a regular guest most of the time, and this contact forms the foundation of her trust in Youku Humanities to start a new program. In "First Person Plural" hosted by Zhou Yijun, as the director, Ren Changzhen helped the show invite the famous host Zhang Yue to be the planner and guest.
There are a lot of people helping in the whole process, teachers in the cultural circle, ** circle, seniors who do program production, etc., have helped us with a lot of ideas. ”
The reason why everyone is very interested is also very simple, the value of humanities programs is not limited to the content of the program, but more valuable is the positive impact that the content brings to every fresh person after it is delivered to users.
At the beginning of 2022, physical isolation made countless people more in need of spiritual intimacy. It is in this context that producer Yang Zhou is determined to make a program that can "use interviews to create emotional connections with users" - "Voices".
Cai Kangyong, who has not appeared in the public eye for a long time, was invited by the production team to go out of the mountain, and Yang Zhou feels that his background color is "to be able to empathize with different people, whether it is pain, struggle or confusion, he can feel these things, and he can also disassemble emotions in a relatively peaceful way." ”
The team wanted interviewees to "have clear values, outlook on life, and be able to clearly guide their own lives." Cai Kangyong once said in an interview that the meaning of the existence of "The Voice" is not to make the audience "better", but to make the audience "better".
When Sun Li was picking vegetables in the vegetable garden, she was talking about her family and regrets in her career;When Makoto Shinkai chats about the story behind the movie, mentioning love and disaster;When the recording time has been completed, Cai Kangyong ...... when he was reluctant to go to the house of water brother Wang Yuheng to watch the movie posterThere is always a kind of warmth that is inadvertently revealed.
Yang Zhou said that this is the spiritual temperament that the show is trying to convey: "It is especially important to be better than good, and I hope everyone can unload their burdens and move forward more bravely and easily." It's great to be able to get that across to the audience. ”
is like what Liu Zhenyun said in the last issue of "The Voice": "Literature has picked up the person who is neglected by life." Youku's humanities programs have found the "greatest common divisor" between cultural figures and users, like a soft net, salvaging the pieces of "duckweed" struggling on the surface of the real water and placing them safely on the shore.
At 8 p.m. on December 21, in a shared space in Langyuan, Beijing, a viewing party was underway.
The deep meaning of choosing this time point may be that the screen in front of the audience is showing Youku Humanities's new program "Why Not Candle Tour". The name is taken from the last two sentences of the Chinese poem "Less than 100 Years of Life": "The days are short, the nights are long, why not travel with candles".
In fact, the original name of this show was "Night Wandering God", but producer Zhao Bo felt that the changed name was also good:"Why not candle swim this sentence will have an attitude in it, it is a calling, daily life has a lot of hardship, it is better to simply give yourself a holiday at night, why not candle swim. ”
In the first episode of the program, Xu Zhiyuan played the role of a "night traveler", hurriedly fleeing from the noisy streets of Changsha, and did not slow down until he entered the quiet streets. In the main creative exchange session after the screening, director Wang Shengzhi bluntly said that there were always many temporary ideas during the recording process, such as Xu Zhiyuan pulling the bookstore owner who resigned to start a business to play scratch and casually said that he was going to play mahjong.
For Xu Zhiyuan, this night tour did bring him many "first experiences", such as "the first time I saw the mahjong table" and "the first time I ate stinky tofu". From the Xiangjiang River to the north of Xiyuan, Xu Zhiyuan played drums with drummer Wen Feng, chatted with bookstore owners about poetry, walked his dog, and walked with the 66-year-old DJ queen.
In the next few episodes, five cultural celebrities in different fields, Gao Yuanyuan, Hu Xia, Fang Qi, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Lao Wolf, are also about to embark on a night tour, showing the other side of the night on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Luoyang, Xiamen, and Fuzhou.
The underlying connotation of "Why Not Candle Tour" as a humanistic documentary program lies in this: people are in two different states during the day and at night.
According to producer Zhao Bo, when the project was first established in May 2021, Beijing's Liangma River was becoming a gathering place for Chinese New Year's Eve, with young people who could not travel far setting up stalls, drinking, camping and even haircuts by the river every night. A kind of spontaneous nightlife formed by citizens is gradually taking shape, and most of the people involved in it are burdened with heavy social attributes during the day, and only at night do they lose their masks and become themselves. "The night is the distance in their hearts, and at that moment the spirit of the night comes out."
Zhao Bo told the Hedgehog Commune: "All things considered, we feel that the night will be a new field of humanistic expression, which can present different humanistic content." ”
Also trying new fields and new forms is Zheng Yanfei. After producing many seasons of "Round Table Pie", the first podcast ** program "Let's Talk" on the whole network with her as the producer was launched.
In the past two years, podcasts have been popular, and after a series of data research, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the user portrait of podcast content overlaps with Youku's humanities, so we wanted to make a bold attempt to turn podcasts into **. Zheng and his team quickly locked on the famous podcast "Bored Zhai", a podcast hosted by two comedians with a whopping 320,000 subscribers in the small universe.
In order to restore the recording environment behind the scenes of the "Bored Zhai" podcast as much as possible, "Let's Talk" directly moved the recording scene to the video studio, a large square table was placed in **, the host and the guests sat opposite each other, and everyone wore headsets to improvise and interact. The challenge of transforming the audio program into a program that can be used is to choose a theme that can be transformed, "The better effect is the episode of "The Blind Teacher", and the audience can more truly feel the positive energy she conveys after seeing her image. Zheng Yanfei recalled.
The expansion of the field and the expansion of the new situation are important, but Zhao Bo, the producer of "Why Not Candle Tour", still reminds himself from time to time:"Whether it is technical or formal innovation, it is just a way to make the program better, but it may not be the core of the humanities program, the core still has to return to the people. ”
As 2023 is about to pass, Zheng Yanfei revealed that the seventh season of "Round Table Pie" is in full swing;Zhao Bozheng and director Wang Shengzhi discussed how to make the sequels of "The Daily Life of Literature", "The Growth of the Earth" and "Why Not Candle Travel";Luo Yuan and Yang Zhou, producers of the new programs "First Person Plural" and "Voices", also expressed their desire to keep doing it.
At 10 p.m. on December 21, the viewing of "Why Not Candle Tour" ended, and the audience left the warm "safe haven" and scattered in the cold wind.
What is unforgettable is the souvenir prepared by Youku Humanities for the audience that day: a Rubik's Cube, which is printed with classic IPs and cultural figures that have accompanied everyone in the past 11 years, and the six sides of the Rubik's Cube present a matrix of cultural figures full of infinite possibilities.
Whenever the Rubik's Cube of cultural figures begins to writhe, there will be new programs born in Youku Humanities, and it is this magic from "people" that drives Youku Humanities to stride towards 12 years.