The Three Levels of Transforming Long Plays into Short Plays

This article will show you why it is popular to turn long dramas into short dramas. What are the three levels of short dramas? Of course, this article is recommended for companies or individual operators engaged in the short video industry.

Reality has once again confirmed McLuhan's theory of "the medium is the message". That is, the medium not only determines the style of the message, but also determines the content of the message, which in turn affects people's habits of understanding and thinking. Weibo has turned writing into jokes, and short videos have turned long dramas into short dramas , allowing those who are foresighted to reap the benefits.

For Yu Zheng, who has been on a roller coaster of "leading the trend - being ridiculed by the crowd" for a long time, being able to keenly capture this change can also make him feel proud. With the popularity of "Mo Yu Yun Jian" in June, a quote from producer Yu Zheng has also been widely circulated: "It's funny that there are still many people who look down on short dramas. In fact, this is the trend of the times - short dramas are becoming more refined and long dramas are fast-paced. Condensed narratives are urgent. I really don't know what those people who complain are talking about."

At the Shanghai TV Festival forum, Ma Shishi, the director of Ink Rain and Clouds, also mentioned that "Teacher Yu anticipated that the tastes of long drama audiences would change in the future, so he tried to incorporate short drama thinking into the creation of long dramas." It was obvious to the naked eye that this was the part that the audience listened to most attentively.

Everyone wants to learn some tricks to turn long dramas into short dramas. In fact, long before the rise of short dramas, domestic dramas and even various other forms of entertainment content have been spontaneously and consciously adapting to short videos.

So, what are the factors that make up the "short drama flavor"? Why are some attempts to shorten long dramas successful while others fail miserably? How should we view and expect this trend?

1. Short dramatization of content

Many people recognize the short-play of a long play by its narrative rhythm. In fact, at the pure content level, we can also observe some new hot elements, which are strengthening the distinction between the "pre-short play era" and the "short play era".

Let’s first review the characteristics and formation of short plays. Short plays have two major genes, one is online writing, and the other is short video.

The genes of online literature are that one of the predecessors of short dramas was information flow advertisements on free reading platforms, so the content bears a deep imprint of online literature. Moreover, due to the different review standards for long and short dramas and their different positioning in the minds of users, short dramas tend to be more "flying", and time travel and rebirth are almost everywhere here.

The gene of short videos is that the distribution of short dramas is extremely dependent on short video platforms. They must be based on short video users and make things that ordinary people can understand, care about, and feel involved in. In most cases, the answer to this question is family stories. The combination of the two genes leads to short dramas often starting with an approachable situation, and then connecting to a magical and fantastic development of heaven and earth.

As for long dramas, a prominent change in the past two years is that the content of "rebirth" and "rebirth/transformation and revenge" elements has reached a new high.

In the past, it took four years after Temptation to get the next revenge drama Nirvana in Fire. But now, there are only a few months between the revenge drama Mo Yu Yun Jian, in which the bride dies tragically and returns with a new face, and in between, there is a modern suspense drama New Life, in which a top student turns evil and deceives five people.

The direct cause of this change is naturally the official relaxation of the restrictions on rebirth themes. In addition, the change in the IP landscape is also a major influencing factor.

As Jinjiang IPs are repeatedly embroiled in controversy, the drama industry is extending olive branches to new platforms such as Tomato Novels and Zhihu, and is looking back to the accumulation of Yuewen Women's Channel, so that long dramas have more intersections with short dramas in terms of subject matter and interest . In addition to a large number of rebirth dramas in the works, there is also recent filing news showing that long dramas have set their sights on the popular time travel genre, and will adapt the Tomato Novels IP "Rebirth in the 1980s: My Wife is a Little Hot".

Coincidentally, in the past two years, long dramas have also reached a new level of using melodramatic weapons such as family matters. Specifically, ancient idol dramas and modern idol dramas, which used to be more "out of touch with the world", have now become more down-to-earth.

"Ink Rain and Clouds" fully utilizes the advantages of local ancient idol dramas, depicting the grievances and resentment of Xue Fangfei and Jiang Li from the perspectives of "the in-laws bullying" and "the stepmother not being a human being" respectively. It quickly captured the audience's attention and formed a sharp contrast with a large number of fairy puppet dramas that are difficult to empathize with.

Urban dramas are even more adept at using strange relatives to start topics and attract traffic, even "Cheng Huan Ji" and "Rose Story" adapted from Yi Shu's IP are not immune. The scumbag and mistress track has even brought out new tricks such as the wife holding hands with the mistress, not loving the mistress but loving the third wife.

Another hot topic shared by both parties is immoral love.

Short dramas need to attract attention as quickly as possible with limited story length, limited cast and publicity costs, so it is easy to set up first, rely on extreme CP to open the way, and supplement with some erotic touches. The ancient style "The Princess Is Above" with female A and male O, "Provoke" with the Republic of China's stepmother literature, and "Love Locked for Three Lifetimes" with a domineering warlord forcing love, all became popular in this way.

In 2023, the field of long dramas was still dominated by the masses' spontaneous "orthopedics" ("My Human Fireworks"). By 2024, the trend of immorality had swept through the creation of long dramas. "Flower Love" was about a female protagonist who pretended to be someone else and a male protagonist who pretended to be a widower. "Mo Yu Yun Jian" was just a long drama by a madman, as netizens said, and no one was having a normal relationship at all.

Second, the form of short drama

Any film or TV work is a combination of content and form. Short videos influence not only what is said, but also how it is said.

The core of the short play in the script arrangement is to seek to improve the narrative efficiency. Its external manifestation can be a faster and more compact rhythm; it can be to omit the foreshadowing and make everything more direct; it can also be a more diverse narrative order and narrative method.

Perhaps to accommodate the viewing habits of TV audiences, traditional long dramas are mostly straightforward, and it is good enough if the main theme and the event that changes the fate of the characters appear at the end of the first episode. In this case, a very typical situation of driving viewers away is that the audience has no idea what the drama is about after watching it for a long time.

Long plays that have been shortened to short plays use flashbacks and interpolations more frequently, and are more creative in editing and transitions. Take "Ink Rain and Clouds" as an example. In the first ten minutes of the first episode, the heroine has gone through life and death, and then back to life, leading to the main plot of revenge. The details of her previous interactions with her relatives and ex-husband are only flashed back when necessary.

Of course, these are not the inventions of short dramas. Movies that need to tell stories within one or two hours, as well as high-level short dramas at home and abroad that have absorbed the main creators of movies, have been playing with this set earlier. "New Life" directed by Shen Ao also uses editing to compress multiple stories from multiple time and space and multiple perspectives into just 10 episodes, increasing the density, exploding information, and making the experience full.

"Fullness" is very important for short plays. Short play director A Fei told Hard Candy that the pace of watching short videos is very fast, and the information is bombarded with high intensity, leaving the audience no room to breathe, so they may continue watching. Therefore, short plays are not only fast-paced, but the audio-visual presentation is often more intense.

For example, a line of dialogue in a traditional long play can last for ten seconds, while in a short play, the scene is switched every three to five seconds, creating a sense of back and forth, which makes the audience dizzy. Another example is that the performance of a short play is more exaggerated, and it is strange to just watch it, so music and camera movements are usually added to "fight poison with poison".

In the final analysis, the short plays are too short and the actors are uneven, which means that the creators need to use more audio-visual means to express their feelings. Some short play directors such as Zhizhu and Zeng Qingjie are highly praised by netizens because of their ability to create a "sense of atmosphere" at a low cost. Blower King Lu Haojiji is a senior in this lineage. Under his command, all departments of "Mo Yu Yun Jian" are full of energy. The camera is like the actors' clothes and hair, and rarely stays completely still.

In my opinion, there is no right or wrong in form. The key is that the form, content and positioning of the work should be consistent. The reason why "Mo Yu Yun Jian" won by being a short drama is that the very crazy content met an even crazier presentation form . More importantly, its original novel is a very routine ancient Chinese novel. The short drama adaptation will not affect the understanding of the core audience, nor will it weaken the charm of the story.

There are also many negative examples of failures due to incompatibility. Although Jin Yong's Martial Arts World can also be interpreted as a routine of male-oriented cool novels, the pursuit of speed and the massive compression of the background of the times and the group images of the martial arts world often have disastrous effects.

There is also the earlier "Camp of Love". It is clearly a dual-traffic, star-rated drama, and the script adaptation is relatively traditional, but it is paired with a short-play audio-visual packaging - strong camera movements and heavy skinning without any aesthetic sense, and the result is of course not harmonious.

3. Short Drama of the Model

The "pig food theory" of short videos is still ringing in our ears, and the talk of "short dramas of long dramas" is likely to trigger many negative associations. In particular, this trend was first led by Yu Zheng, who has both good and bad reputations.

But in the final analysis, some of the methodologies of short dramas are derived from the study of the psychology of short video users, some are derived from the adaptation to the short video dissemination environment, and some are essentially the workarounds of young creators under limited conditions such as low cost and short length. It is certainly not advisable to absorb them all, but it is also unnecessary to overturn them all.

Bad dramas, low-level dramas, and melodramatic dramas did not appear just because of the advent of the short video era. At present, the most alarming thing about the short-form drama is not the continuous decline in the fun of the content, but the loss of the long-tail effect of the hit dramas.

On the one hand, the short cycle and short video genes of short dramas make it impossible for them not to use timeliness as a weapon. On the other hand, short dramas have insufficient narrative space, and they focus on explosive points rather than logic. There are often situations where the creativity is OK but the story is not well-told. You may be very happy when you watch it, but you generally don’t want to revisit it afterwards.

These characteristics are also carried over to the short-form long drama.

The business model of short dramas, especially mini-program short dramas, is relatively simple. If the recharge situation is good enough when it is just aired, it doesn’t matter if it is taken off the shelves after a few weeks. The business model of long dramas is more complicated. For hit dramas, it is still advocating long-termism and killing many birds with one stone. Only when the long-tail effect is sufficient can it continue to bring benefits to all parties. Therefore, this may be the most important issue that needs to be paid attention to in the short-termization of long dramas.

As for what short plays can most easily learn from long plays, I think it is not any specific methodology, but the attitude towards making plays with fewer distractions and a higher degree of 2C.

Over the years of development, long-running dramas have developed a morbid cycle: high quality requires money, and the higher the investment, the more stakeholders involved, and the wider the expected impact, the more considerations beyond the content are involved, giving rise to many obviously unreasonable but conventional ways of handling things.

For example, middle-aged actors are forced to play the teenage years of their characters. Sometimes it is not necessarily because of inflation, but in the traditional media era, people tend to let big-name leading actors appear as soon as possible to retain the audience with familiar faces. But obviously, this will sacrifice some of the rationality of the plot.

For example, long dramas are easy to invite big-name stars and creators, but it is also easy for the crew to have an imbalance in discourse power. This leads to the drama being used as someone's self-expression, or making compromises to attract fans and strengthen someone's personality. As for whether the audience likes it when it is broadcast, at least at the first scene of creation, it is not the first priority consideration.

The good thing about short dramas is that, due to cost constraints, there is no condition for such distractions. With all the staff being tools, the plot is more important, and we use all our skills to study and serve users. This is obviously not exclusive to short dramas. The same principle was also used in the story of "Story of Yanxi Palace" when it was small but achieved great success.

In this light, if short plays can encourage long dramas to return to their original intention and purity, and pay more attention to the plot and audience experience, how can it not be considered a great merit?

Author: Gu Han; Editor: Li Chunhui

Source: WeChat public account "Entertainment Hard Candy (ID: yuleyingtang)"