A 100-episode drama only takes five days to shoot. You don't understand what a cool production line is.

A handsome and overbearing CEO, a mysterious urban "Dragon King"... Hundreds of episodes of "bloody" short dramas, which only took seven days to shoot, have made the audience unable to stop watching one episode after another. How do these low-cost assembly line short dramas retain the audience, and from what channels do they make money? Let's take a look at this new "assembly line" of cool short dramas.

"Too rustic."

"It's so addictive."

Now, you can see a lot of such voices on major social platforms. Do you think they are watching cheesy videos?

But in fact, they are talking about a new product that has recently become popular on the Internet: TikTok short drama.

Short dramas, also known as online micro-short dramas, are only a few minutes long per episode. Their history can be traced back to "Report to the Boss" and "Never Expected That", but now they are appearing in front of people in a brand new content form.

Pay attention, this is a short play about "love", following the time-tested route of the overbearing president's abusive love.

Judging from the plot alone, you might find it familiar.

There is an extremely dramatic conflict at the beginning: the heroine is the owner of a fast food restaurant who cannot pay the rent. She just received a rent reminder in the last second, and the next second an old man handed her a hand-painted 100 yuan bill, wanting to eat.

Another turn, a new "storm" appeared:

A well-dressed customer in the store witnessed an old man with dementia successfully eating a meal with counterfeit money, and then changed his clothes and came to eat and drink for free. Not only did he come himself, but he also found new ways to bring in new people every day to eat and drink for free together, and the female boss received them one by one.

Then, the vicious landlord came again and insisted on collecting the rent two days in advance. He mocked the heroine for doing good things. The one who had been eating and drinking for free before ran away as soon as he saw that the situation was not right. The demented old man stuffed counterfeit money into the heroine's pocket in an attempt to keep her.

Finally, a big CEO in a suit, along with his subordinates, drove a luxury car to pick up the old man.

This is just the first episode, which is 3 minutes and 54 seconds long.

Isn't this... just a variant and extended version of the Crooked-Mouth Dragon King?

It's really quite different. If you look back, you will find that the graphics of the Dragon King series are very simple. Many scenes seem to have been shot at any random location, with almost no attention to lighting or scenery.

But these short dramas nowadays are not like that. They have scenery, lighting, very delicate pictures, richer content, and the overall level is approaching that of real TV dramas.

Image source: horizontal screen short play "My Half Boyfriend"

Although you may not have ordered these short dramas, their ratings are really no worse than those of traditional film and television works.

In order to catch the audience's attention, most short plays often have a very fast pace, with multiple conflicts and reversals within a minute, either to ignite emotions or to be melodramatic and bizarre.

Such extremely intensive pleasure effectively captures the audience, and the popularity of short dramas can also be measured in "billions" , and has become a presence that cannot be ignored on major video platforms.

The impressive number of views is also further promoting the production of short dramas. On the mainstream short video platforms Douyin and Kuaishou, a quick search will reveal independent pages dedicated to short dramas, covering a wide range of content, from sweet pet stories to ancient styles and hilarious ones.

To put it simply, short dramas can be roughly divided into three types: mini-program short dramas, vertical screen short dramas on video platforms (mainly Douyin and Kuaishou), and horizontal screen short dramas on video platforms (mainly iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video).

Yes, all the video platforms you are familiar with are playing...

There are 100 short dramas popular in the mini program, each episode is about 1-2 minutes long.

Douyin and Kuaishou short dramas usually have around 12-24 episodes, each episode is 3-5 minutes long.

Now on Douyin and Kuaishou, there are many internet celebrities who specialize in producing such short dramas, and when you open their homepages, you will see short drama content everywhere.

Image source: Douyin @姜十七

The length and number of episodes of horizontal screen short dramas are similar to those of Douyin and Kuaishou, but overall they are closer to regular TV dramas, with more sophisticated production, and they also need a filing number.

It can be a film or TV adaptation of a melodramatic campus romance, featuring all kinds of weird men and women, or it can be a mini version of a sci-fi blockbuster, bringing visual enjoyment. No matter what you like, the short drama that suits your taste may be on the way to being filmed.

How are skits mass-produced? And how do they make money?

I found several people in the industry, including directors who switched from traditional film and television to short dramas, and short video producers who have had in-depth contact with short dramas. They told me that 2020 is generally regarded as the "first year of short dramas". After three years of development, the production and investment process of short dramas is now extremely complete.

The scripts for short dramas are mainly derived from online literature . There are online literature companies that own many online literature IPs and directly cooperate with film and television companies to jointly develop short dramas. There are also specialized short drama companies that acquire online literature and turn it into short drama scripts, which are then handed over to filming companies for production.

For example, Youku's urban love short drama comes from the Chinese online "The Tyrant Marriage: Long-Planned"↓

Tencent Video's "My Half Boyfriend" is based on Tomato's novel "The God of Study's Love Guide". The first scene of the novel is the key plot in the first episode of the short drama, where the male protagonist asks the female protagonist to be a nude model.

Traditional TV dramas are often time-consuming and costly due to issues such as their size. For example, the well-known "The Legend of Zhen Huan" took 132 days to shoot, which is not enough to shoot three episodes in a year.

But each episode of a short drama is only 5 minutes at most, so the output must be increased: each director has to shoot about 30 films a year.

"Speed" and "volume" are "necessities" for the survival of short drama producers.

The short play director Han Dao is a traditional film and television worker. In 2020, when he was working in a short play company, his friend asked him for help, and that's how he came into contact with short plays. Now he works in Kuaishou Top Short Play Company and told me that after the company is up and running, each director is expected to produce 24 works every year.

How efficient is the work? Let me put it this way. Director Wang's previous work was 100 episodes, with a total length of over 120 minutes, and it took only 5 days to shoot. The entire production cycle, including pre-production preparation and post-production editing, is only about one month.

In order to improve efficiency, short drama companies will look for multiple contracting units after purchasing scripts in bulk. I also checked the Hengdian crew information website and found that many of the ones being filmed are short dramas.

The selection of actors is also very different from traditional film and television. There are no lengthy biographies of the characters. Often only the key plots and emotions are captured, and the requirement for actors is often: to be able to act.

This is still relatively detailed. There are many companies whose actor recruitment information is even simpler and more straightforward: to play the cousin's brother-in-law, you must not look like a poor man, after all, he works in a bank; to play the campus hunk, you must not be ugly; to play the villain female supervisor, you must be a green tea or female competitor.

Some requirements even go like this: men must be handsome, and women must be pretty and kind-hearted.

In short, it is extremely simplified and stereotyped.

With the ever-simplifying process, a steady stream of short dramas are being mass-produced from the camera.

Depending on the platform and profit model, the focus of the short drama will also be different.

The 100-episode short series relies on "payment at key points" to make a profit . You are shown 10 episodes first, and you have to pay for the remaining 90 episodes.

The price per episode is not expensive

There is a problem with doing this. If you only make one movie, what if it flopped?

Therefore, the common approach in the industry is to "gamble" on a large scale, and then rely on feedback data + cash ability to win.

The 100 episodes of short dramas that Director Wang shot previously cost about 100,000 yuan. In his words, "In fact, short dramas are low-cost trial and error. They are produced at extremely low cost and at an extremely fast speed, and then put on the market to obtain feedback."

It sounds like a bit of a hit-and-miss thing...

However, after being put on the market in large quantities, the short drama companies will monitor the data, select dramas with good paid effects, and increase their investment in them. The investment in a hit short drama is usually more than 10 million.

Nowadays, on short video platforms, you can see countless short drama cut videos, which collect the most exciting and refreshing parts of a short drama. There is no logic at all, just to attract users to click and watch.

Under this process, short drama companies often cast a wide net and invest in making ten or eight short dramas, hoping that if two of them become popular, they will make money back.

With a hint of trial, Shichao asked them the same question: "Is it true that such a large-scale operation will definitely be profitable?" Well, no one denied it, but the directors said very seriously: "Most of the time, it's not much profit."

When it comes to Douyin and Kuaishou short dramas, one word that cannot be avoided is: platform support.

The platform hopes to have more high-quality content, so it will offer incentives. Participating in corresponding activities can get cash rewards or traffic coupons. The reward is based on the number of times each episode is played or the number of times it is played.

Different rules for different periods and platforms

Director Han told me that the short drama he shot before recovered its costs with the support of the platform and made a small profit, but the main profit still came from the rewards from the MCN company.

Actors in skits are often not stars, but internet celebrities on the platform. By increasing the number of fans and fan activity on their skit accounts, the MCN company to which the internet celebrities belong will give them rewards.

The massive influx of capital also led to internal circulation.

The themes of the short plays range from sweet pet stories to sadomasochism, from love to mystery, science fiction, and urban stories, gradually becoming all-encompassing.

The format has been changed from vertical screen to horizontal screen, and the cost has been increased from hundreds of thousands per episode to three or four hundred thousand or even millions. Some people have added more action scenes, some have chosen to improve the visual effects, and some have begun to try to create content types that require a lot of money.

The animated image is a bit blurry, but the picture is actually very high-definition. Urban fantasy short drama "Floating Life: The Fantasy World"

However, there are also many people who have gone in the wrong direction and become accomplices of traffic.

If reversals can attract attention, then keep piling up reversals; if vulgarity can attract attention, then use extremely bloody plots.

In the previous second, the six-year-old daughter called the soldier king and asked him to save her mother. Only then did the soldier king know that he had a daughter. In the next second, the domineering president locked up his enemy's daughter in a mental hospital, and the woman was sold.

The increasing number of apps has caused headaches for the platforms. From Douyin and Kuaishou to WeChat mini-programs, they are all launching corresponding governance standards.

Some people don't like short dramas, especially those that are trying to catch people's attention every minute. They think that industrially produced content is highly stereotyped and cannot be like a 120-minute classic old film that can always make people reminisce.

This statement is not wrong. There are routines in making short plays. A few years ago, the script of a time-travel short play was very popular and creative. People are still copying it now. Once a script becomes popular, the market will instantly be filled with its brothers and sisters.

But what they don’t understand is that the people who consume these contents are not doing it for a sense of “gain”, they are just looking for a form of entertainment to make their lives less boring, so it doesn’t matter what it is.

For those who produce these contents, creating legends is important, but life is about meeting the daily consumption needs of the masses through large-scale production.

Faced with huge consumer demand, some short dramas are fully armed with a weapon called "cool points" and are released on hundreds of millions of mobile screens with a budget of tens of millions. Some short dramas continue to evolve, trying to find a balance between imagination and scale.

What really makes me feel emotional is that, with the help of algorithms, the once absolutely creative industry has gradually become a "fast-moving consumer product" that is precisely calculated by programs.

Image and information sources:

Weibo, TikTok: @珊珊~, @姜十七;

My Wife is a Cooking God

Some source illustrations have been marked

Author: Bad Review

Source: WeChat public account "Chaping (ID: chaping321)"