If a short drama wants to "live long", it has to rely on high-quality content competition.
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Written by Han Haoyue (columnist) Edited by Liu Tianhong Proofread by Liu Jun.
Stills from one of the popular skits on Reelshort, "Don't Divorce the Secret Billionaire Heiress". Screenshot of social platform.
When Long Aotian becomes Sebastian, when Leng Bingning becomes Selena, a number of Chinese tyrant-style short dramas are becoming popular in the United States.
According to "China News Weekly", the **App Reelshort, which publishes these short dramas, has ranked first on the iOS entertainment list in the United States, and it is also the second place on the overall list, and users need to pay about $20 to finish chasing a drama, which is 15 more than NetflixThe $49 monthly standard membership is even more expensive, and Hollywood is "a little rushed" about it.
From the perspective of content composition, in addition to "boss", reelshort also has the genre of "love after marriage, sadomasochism, werewolf, counterattack", but the story of "boss" is the most popular and has become the label of reelshort. Reelshort has also carried out targeted expansion in content delivery according to the cultural background of different countries and regions, compared with Netflix's hit rate of only 10%, Reelshort's pursuit of a hit rate of 30%-50%.
While the boss-style short drama creates pleasure, it also brings anxiety. This is no different in the United States. The anxiety caused by Reelshort is divided into three levels: the first is the producer's anxiety, whose person in charge said that he is not the "boss" content audience, "and even resists the cool narrative", and its production team also has a heavy anxiety about the explosion;The second is the anxiety of the main creators, the production mode of the short drama, which has a great impact on the concept of the hired American directors and actors, Hollywood actors say "movies are not played like this, how can you be like a madman", and some directors say "I don't cooperate with you anymore";Finally, the audience is anxious, the report said that "many people haven't actually watched it, and more than 50% may leave if they don't like it", when the audience finds out the routine of the refreshing drama, whether there will be a continuous motivation to pay, this has to be marked with a question mark.
With these three layers of anxiety, the achievements of the overlord-style short drama overseas need to be viewed rationally: first, the content of the short drama does not represent the cultural output of Chinese storiesSecond, after relying on "boss" and "popular style" to have a certain market share, if the problem of richness and diversity of content cannot be solved, the sword of Damocles above the head of the short drama may fall at any time.
In the process of development, Reelshort gradually compressed the duration of the short drama to become shorter and shorter, from "3 minutes or 9 minutes of short play" to "1 minute short play", which means that in a few tens of seconds, it is necessary to accommodate a large amount of information including plot conflicts that stimulate the eyeballs and exaggerated and deformed performances.
To put it bluntly, the skit is a tightrope game, with huge profits on the left and cliffs on the right, and life and death depend on at what point in time the audience's curiosity and patience will ** and disappear.
It is true that from the perspective of human nature, short dramas that highly cater to the audience's emotional refreshment have a tenacious vitality that makes the audience want to stop, but while the audience consumes short dramas, they also "fight" with short dramas all the time, for example, regret for the time taken away by short dramas, and rebellion after being conquered by short dramas.
Once these gray emotions overwhelm the coolness created by the skit, the skit will be abandoned as quickly as it expands. Therefore, the anxiety of short drama producers is not so much caused by the fear that they will not be able to produce enough hits, but rather caused by the "short-lived" characteristics of the nature of short dramas.
If a short drama wants to "live long", it must provide the audience with a wealth of choices like other first-class content and even other works in the field of literature and art, so that the audience can consciously seek the transfer of interest and the filling point of emotional vacancy in the transformation of diverse short drama content. In this way, the short drama can really find a foothold in the long content competition in the future.