Short** shooting scene.
The "top stream" of content products in 2023 is none other than short dramas. As a phenomenal new form of film and television products, after just a few years of accumulation, this year ushered in an explosive period, both in terms of quantity and output value, all the way soaring.
Under the frenzy of vertical screen short dramas, long dramas have become short dramas, horizontal screens have become vertical screens, and with the influx of entrants, the film and television ecology has also changed ......
In order to get close to the ecology of short dramas, Jiupai Finance interviewed investors, producers, directors, actors and studio parties in the short drama industry chain through long-term follow-up visits, trying to get a glimpse of the "short drama rivers and lakes" behind this 10 billion market, and see the pain and itch behind the "cool drama", and the dream and hesitation behind the madness.
Crazy skit "Investigation".
Reporter |Guo Zihao, Chen Jingyi, Huang Yiting.
At 1 o'clock in the morning, at the Dongyang Changjiu International Hotel, 27 kilometers away from Hengdian Film and Television City, the shooting of the vertical screen short drama "It's All Performance" has lasted for 16 hours, and the tiredness is getting stronger with the night. Behind the blazing lights, several actors drooped their heads and relied on silently reciting the script to support their sleepiness, and the staff on the side complained at the top of their voices: "Shoot 3 films a month, I'm about to become a machine."
Only producer He Beichen remained excited, and he drank several bottles of Coke before coming to the set to get some dopamine. "If you can't stand it, you have to top it, and there are still a few scenes that haven't been filmed. He said. At the request of the employer, the vertical screen short drama must be launched on New Year's Day, and He Beichen's team had to finish filming within 6 days. But apparently, he underestimated the intensity of the shooting of vertical skits. "Plop!"A group of actors fainted in the corner of the set, and a staff member called 120.
The chaos didn't last long, and the ambulance arrived quickly, followed by the executive director's urging: "Get back to your place, it's too late for the next one." Time and money wait for no one, at the filming site of the vertical screen short drama, one page on the script is limited to 45 minutes, and every hour of delay will be converted into real gold**, which is spread over the already tight production fee.
Performance" crew punctual ceremony.
Similar things often happen in the short drama crew of "Big Dry and Fast". Lack of funds, crotch pulling, lack of actors, and even group performances. In the face of endless situations, He Beichen could only sigh lightly, "Vertical screen short dramas are a bit difficult to do." ”
Indeed, the current vertical screen short drama market seems to be entering the red sea period. While the influx of hot money has brought explosive growth to the industry, it has also intensified the involution of capital and triggered industry regulation. With the rise of the cost of actors and venues for vertical screen short dramas in Hengdian, the production cost of a vertical screen short drama has increased from 60,000 yuan a year ago to 30-400,000 yuan now, or even more than one million. At the same time, at the moment when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television launched a special vertical screen short drama governance and the platform removed more than 10,000 works, the pace of investment around vertical screen short dramas has slowed down.
The vertical screen skit industry is cooling down rapidly, but there are always brave people who are pinching the last point in time to enter the game. "If someone advises you to censor the high risk and not let you in, it's just that he is afraid that this sea will be a little more popular. He Beichen said. In the past few years, due to the absence of the big drama, the crew and Hengpiao have withdrawn from Hengdian. or hungry and thirsty for a long time, or afraid of missing out, when the vertical screen short drama outlet, the risk is forgotten, and almost everyone is rushing for time, venue, and actors.
Just like an assembly line factory, Hengdian mass-produces dreams such as "domineering president" and "reborn god of war". And the dream of this vertical screen short drama is not only provided to the audience in front of the screen, but also created for frustrated film and television practitioners. 1 year, 373With a market size of 900 million (almost equivalent to 75% of the domestic film box office), the rapidly expanding vertical screen short drama track has attracted infinite reverie, what if Stephen Chow or Wong Kar-wai of the vertical screen short drama industry is born from it?To do this, they decided to give it a go in the Red Sea.
Rely on the amount of traffic to fight for the explosion.
In the vertical screen short drama circle, practitioners have a basic consensus: the hit rate of vertical screen short dramas is 10%.
No one can say where this figure came from, or how rigorously it was calculated, but everyone took it for granted. As a result, one of the simplest and most crude ways was born - "walking". "Just like trying on clothes, as long as there are enough of them, there will always be one you like, and you can even summarize the pattern from it. A director described it like this.
While the outside world is still debating the impact of regulation on the industry, Hengdian's vertical screen skit business is already moving towards the road of industrialization and assembly line. Street food stalls, pubs, restaurants, and even residential farmhouses are all cut off by vertical screen short drama crews, and at its peak, hundreds of vertical screen short dramas are produced from Hengdian every day.
Recruitment information for short dramas can be seen everywhere in Hengdian Film and Television City.
After the skit was blown into the sky by the wind, no one dared to stop easily. "As long as you have the opportunity, you have to shoot hard", director Wang Lei has filmed 10 dramas in succession since June, with an average of 2 films per month;Vertical screen short drama actor Chen Dandan filmed 4 plays in November, and the most intense one was filmed for 25 hours in a row, and he stayed up like this for a week, during which he only slept for two hours a day.
In order to improve the speed of production, the industry has even derived a "set of shots" strategy, that is, actors, teams, and scripts use the same set of templates. "In the same rebirth story, the time point of birth can be in ancient times and in the future, and the protagonist's identity can be rich or poor, and he keeps doing tree-like bifurcation design, but the characters in the script are all the same for at least the first 30 episodes. He Beichen said that this can further compress the filming time of a drama to less than 5 days.
The short cycle and low cost are destined to be fast-moving consumer goods with film and television assembly lines for vertical screen short dramas. In the crazy acceleration of vertical screen skits, everything can be discarded: actors don't need to pave emotions, they rely on mechanical performances, palming, kneeling, and kowtowing in one go;The minimum standard of the scene can be a residential house, an office building, it doesn't matter if you wear a goof, in short, how to save money and how to come;Even the vertical screen short drama itself can be discarded, and vertical screen short drama investors often invest in multiple vertical screen short drama projects, when one of them becomes a hit, the remaining few dramas with little success will be thrown away without hesitation.
Compared with winning by volume on the assembly line, the slightly smarter producers will also study the cool points to attract the audience to recharge, and attract users to pay by setting anchors and hooks to increase the hit rate as much as possible. "Vertical screen short dramas have three elements that increase the weight of popular models - pretending to be X, ruthless words, and soft pornography, as long as they are collected, they will be able to make money. He Beichen concluded. This is similar to the bloody routine of Korean dramas "cancer, car accidents, and incurable" a few years ago, which seems old-fashioned, but is actually the crystallization of the experience of hundreds of industrialized products.
The scene of the skit shooting.
The "Three Elements of Popularity" was implemented by He Beichen into all aspects of the production of "Performance". When interviewing the actors in the early stage, the male and female protagonists were quickly determined, but the female No. 3 "Mi Xiaoshu" could not find a suitable candidate for a long time. In the script, this character is set as a villain woman with a hot body and a high position through her appearance. For vertical screen short dramas, she is the box office guarantee of the whole play, for this reason, He Beichen changed 4 actresses before and after, and the candidates were not determined until the day before filming started.
During the makeup set-up process, the actress who played the role of "Mi Xiaodai" was asked to wear black silk and sequins that showed off her figure;During the shooting, the camera rises from the actor's calves to his thighs, and the color of the black silk gradually lightens due to stretching, and then rises from the chest to the face. This bridge is one of the recharge points of the whole show. "You don't laugh at the low level of vertical screen skits, to laugh at it is to laugh at money. In He Beichen's view, vertical screen short dramas are assembly line commodities, most of which cannot be called works, and have nothing to do with art.
Explosive ≠ get rich.
Rushing into the game at the end of the outlet, He Beichen's goal is to shoot a popular vertical screen short drama. Prior to that, he was more engaged in screenwriting, participated in the production of film projects such as "Detective Chinatown" and "Rise to Fame", and boasted that he had seen big scenes until he saw the essence of the business of vertical screen skits and opened up a new world.
In the past year, He Beichen can always see such a picture in the circle of friends: in the middle of the cake surrounded by fruits, there are red big-character posters "recharge fee exceeds 100 million" and "box office share million". This is the biggest advantage of vertical screen skits - small and big. He Beichen calculated an account for the reporter, taking the interactive vertical screen short drama game "Finished, I Surrounded by Beautiful Girls" as an example, the total shooting cost did not exceed 500,000, but the income was 50 million, and the rate of return was 100 times.
Skit crew celebration cake.
Speaking of this, He Beichen paused, "What industry can be put into production 100 times in a short period of time?"”
In public reports, the popularity of vertical screen short dramas and the myth of getting rich are deeply bound. "After 7 days of shooting, 8 days of recharge over 100 million" and "24 hours of recharge amount of more than 20 million", it seems that a group of people can achieve financial freedom by hitting the hit. But is this really the case?This is survivor bias, for the production team downstream of the industry, the income brought by the popular vertical screen short drama is very limited, let alone getting rich overnight. A practitioner told Jiupai Finance.
Different from the content logic of the traditional film and television industry, vertical screen short dramas are information flow products based on the logic of advertising "streaming". In the overall investment cost, the budget for operation and streaming is much larger than the budget for content production, and almost all vertical screen short dramas will spend more than 80% of their limited cost on streaming. This also leads to more recharge fees flowing to streaming companies and platforms.
Taking a project with a recharge of 50 million yuan as an example, the production team will take 6%, that is, 3 million, and the rest will be in the hands of the platform. He Beichen said that the production team in the downstream of the industry is just a ruthless filming machine, and can only eat the meat on the legs of mosquitoes. Taking Xi'an Fengxing Company, the producer of the industry's first popular vertical screen short drama "Wushuang", as an example, it has filmed 14 popular vertical screen short dramas, but the income from vertical screen short dramas is less than 10 million yuan, one of the reasons is that vertical screen short dramas rely heavily on investment expenditure, "A short drama with a box office of more than 100 million yuan, of which the cost of streaming accounts for ninety percent." ”
What's more, in the entire industry chain, ordinary production teams do not have control over popular models. "In addition to the shoddy production of the original content, vertical screen short dramas are easy to fall into the dilemma that no one will watch them if they don't cast streams. Li Yizhu, an investor in the fireworks platform, told reporters that the logic of the vertical screen short drama platform is to use 10% of the money earned by the hit to cover the losses caused by the remaining 90%. "The platform has an ROI (production ratio) when this value is greater than 12 can be voted until the ROI is less than 1At 2 o'clock, the platform will end the streaming. And if it's less than 1 at the beginning, you don't want to give up directly. ”
Under this logical guidance, the louder the roar of the assembly line engine of Hengdian Industry, the more vertical screen short dramas of the producer will be thrown into the content graveyard. In several days of interviews, similar cases are not uncommon: someone sold a car to invest in a vertical screen short drama, even if ten hits were filmed, they were still in debt;A director invested 300,000 yuan to shoot a vertical screen short drama and only paid back 200 yuan, so he had to film for free to pay off his debts.
From the perspective of recharge returns, at this stage, 15% of vertical screen short dramas can reach tens of millions, 35% barely keep their capital, and the remaining 50% have no return. He Beichen told reporters. There will be popular vertical screen short dramas in the future, but the proportion of breaking 100 million will be less and less, and the overall recharge return is also decreasing. An obvious fact is that in the vertical screen short drama ***, the vertical screen short drama battle report that used to recharge tens of millions and break 100 million yuan has now become a recharge of hundreds of thousands.
Ask for profit upstream.
Since you can't make money, why do you still have to go so hard to shoot hits?The answer given by Wang Lei is "to gain the right to speak". As long as the team's ability to create vertical screen short dramas is confirmed, there will be platforms that will come to the door with projects and resources, such as good actors, excellent scripts, a large number of investors, and even double the production fee. No content creator can withstand such a **, these resources can greatly increase the probability of the next hit vertical screen short drama, and even move to the horizontal screen market.
From this point of view, vertical screen short dramas are still a winner-takes-all market, especially in the increasingly cruel Red Sea, only the production team that has become the top hit can ask for profits upstream and survive.
Short drama producer Ou Junyu only started to shoot vertical screen short dramas in August last year, and has filmed a total of 6 high-quality vertical screen short dramas so far, and 5 have exploded. Ou Junyu can continue to create popular models, relying on the binding with the platform Huasheng Book City. In the entire industrial chain, the latter owns the copyright, screenwriter, and adjusts the direction of the script to the production team according to market changes. Ou Junyu's team can often give priority to getting a good script to increase the probability of a hit. The team's pre-production fee platform is all out, and 30% of the overall profit of the vertical screen short drama will be given to the producer in the later stage.
Vertical screen short dramas roll to higher-cost costume dramas.
In fact, this kind of cooperation is still a platform-led all-investment model, and the production team only gets a hard fee, and the normal account sharing rarely exceeds one million. A senior producer who participated in the whole link of vertical screen short dramas revealed to reporters that what really brings considerable profits is still in the investment model, that is, the production team invests shares through the production fee and becomes an investor in the vertical screen short drama plate, and the final recharge and return are divided according to the proportion of investment with the platform.
However, a similar account-sharing model will also increase the risk, because the flow data is controlled by the platform internally, the platform can completely falsify the recharge data, resulting in no profit to be shared by the producer, which has actually become a dark box in the vertical screen short drama, "The platform has the final say." The person said.
In this case, some production teams directly bypass the platform and move towards the upper end of the industrial chain by contacting mature brands or investors. At present, one way that is relatively recognized in the industry is to rely on the traffic attribute of vertical screen short dramas as an advertising carrier, and the brand will also prepare the original publicity and distribution channels. Taking the crew of "Performance" as an example, the investor is a consultant who specializes in consulting corporate brands, and the purpose of investing in vertical screen short dramas is to expand the market and educate customers with traffic distribution.
The investor originally wanted to invest in a drama or a big network, at least 20 million, the cost is high and may not be effective, compared to the vertical screen short drama with its own traffic attributes, its cost is only 500,000-600,000. He Beichen said. In addition, the general audience of vertical screen short dramas is in the third or fourth line, which is enough to sink, and these audiences happen to be consumers of massagers, hair growth lotions, and domestic skin care products. At present, many brands that have tasted the sweetness have begun to take the initiative to customize vertical screen short dramas. According to incomplete statistics, in the past year, only the three brands of Marubeni, Han Shu, and Proya have produced 13 customized vertical screen short dramas, and even international brands such as Cadillac and Pepsi have begun to implant vertical screen short dramas with titles and patches.
In any case, the vertical screen skit is still a big cake, and everyone wants to get a piece of it, standing on their own position to maximize the benefits. Li Yizhu said that if the production team in the downstream of the industry wants to make a profit, the only way to go up as much as possible, get close to the most profitable link in the industry, and even integrate into it.
The big drama ends or the show begins.
From the initial period of "production cost tens of thousands of yuan, you can shoot with a mobile phone" in 2019, to the reckless era of "violence and side-rubbing content flying all over the sky", and then to enjoy the label of "the most profitable track in 2023", it took only three years for vertical screen short dramas to come to the spotlight.
And now, in front of vertical screen short drama practitioners is a cold reality - rationality is returning, popular models are decreasing, and they have to face the pain of big waves and sands.
With the launch of a month-long special vertical screen short drama governance by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the content side has taken the lead in changing - plots such as slapping and revenge for killing mothers have become taboos;Genres such as God of War, rebirth, and superpowers also need to be avoided as much as possible. For the sake of insurance, the crew of "Performance" plans to cut out two versions, which will be released to the capital and the market depending on the situation. "Now there are many vertical screen short dramas on the market, saying that they are saving up for the Spring Festival, but they are actually in a wait-and-see state. Some practitioners said.
In addition, after the influx of hot money, low-cost vertical screen short dramas have gradually become heavy assets. After the vertical screen short drama became popular, every scene, actor, and screenwriter in Hengdian are raising prices, taking 100 episodes of scripts as an example, a year ago it may have been 2,000 yuan, and now the market is 20,000 pieces;Now the vertical screen skit actors who need a daily salary of 1,000 yuan may have been recruited by only 100-200 group performers before. This directly led to the crazy superposition of the cost of producing a vertical screen short drama, "A few months ago, a vertical screen short drama could be produced for about 300,000 yuan, and if you were lucky, it could become a hit, but now it is almost impossible." He Beichen said.
As for the "Detailed Rules for the Creation, Production and Content Review of Online Micro Short Dramas", which has attracted much attention in the industry, industry insiders judge that the draft will be issued in April next year. After that, it will inevitably lose some viewers with curious attributes, and at the same time, it will also open up new user circles, but every time you shoot a vertical screen short drama, it is likely to take a longer review process. The production cycle will be extended, and the situation of "January 1 vertical screen" may change in the future.
Cool point, low cost, short cycle, when these three key ** are lost, will the vertical screen short drama die?Everyone's answer to this question is different.
As a business contaminated with profiteering attributes, He Beichen believes that the life cycle of vertical screen short dramas is almost over. "Now the Internet University is not as profitable as it used to be, because the market has begun to formalize, how much money is spent has become transparent, and there will be clear standards for censorship. And now the water of the vertical screen short drama is still muddy. "The only thing you can do is to ride the muddy water and quickly enter the field to touch a big fish.
Even the production team, which has already filmed a lot of hit dramas, has quite complicated emotions when faced with the life and death of vertical screen short dramas. During the interview, practitioners will always miss the era of the "100 big dramas" in Hengdian back then, "people who are serious about film and television are still burdened to do short dramas", "If you can, who doesn't want to shoot horizontal screen dramas", more people will take vertical screen short dramas as a transitional product waiting for the return of big dramas.
But they also know what the wave of vertical screen short dramas has brought to the film and television industry.
In the long "film and television winter", vertical screen dramas have given a large number of low-level actors and "drifting" opportunities, so that they will not be unable to survive. "The group performers and small specialists who originally pulled a train are now directly playing women.
First, the second female, the value also soared directly. A casting director told reporters.
At the same time, this fire also brought a ray of light to the desperate film and television companies. "In the past few years, due to the shrinkage of funds, large projects could not be done, and some companies did not open projects for three years, and the consumption was exhausted. Li Yizhu said.
The crew bus in front of the dining hall.
From an emotional point of view, no one wants the skit to die, after all, it once gave the middle and lower classes a way out. A practitioner said. Fortunately, the new force pouring into short dramas is strong enough: in November, Wang Jinghe announced his entry into the vertical screen short drama market;In December, Wanda Pictures cooperated with Lehua on vertical screen short drama works;Even the head MCN agency Worry-free Media also announced that it would cooperate with Finger Games to produce "short drama + game"...
The addition of a series of regular armies announced the beginning of the era of high-quality vertical screen short dramas. In the next few months, it will be decided whether vertical screen short dramas can shift from traffic business to content business, and perhaps in the spring of next year, the curtain of vertical screen short dramas will really open.
When the windfall profits are about to dissipate, some people step on the wind outlet, some people leave out of fear, and some people choose to stay. "Because of the short drama, the Hengdian film and television industry has started to reshuffle again this year. Faced with this crazy and unknown new track, Wang Lei decided to follow the wind and go down to see the endgame of this gambling game.
*: Jiupai Finance.