Picture source @Visual China
Text | True Story Research Laboratory, author | Shi Yuhan, editor | Malu
Twenty years ago, many Chinese people’s livelihood overseas was to open restaurants. In the past ten years, a new generation of Chinese students from Kochi have begun to make money in major American technology companies. Now, Chinese have a new job choice: filming short plays.
Starting in 2023, short dramas going overseas will become a new craze in the film and television industry. Those who follow the code of wealth and capture the trends of the times can always get a piece of the pie when the trend comes. The Chinese-style "volume" will inevitably make the industry move from blue ocean to red ocean in just a blink of an eye.
When the skits of assembly line operations are popular with foreigners with big eyebrows and big eyes, the "short drama workers" in the chain still do not make any money.
Chinese people’s new job: filming short plays
In the first half of 2023, four or five Chinese parents brought their children to Huang Xiaohe, hoping to have their children follow Huang Xiaohe in participating in the filming of short plays to pave the way for their future careers. Huang Xiaohe finally realized that short plays were really popular in the UK.
html Huang Xiaohe, who was born in 2092, studied in the UK for ten years and got his Ph.D. From biology to directing, Huang Xiaohe's career direction has been finalized in stages. He is looking for a world in the film and television industry, and begins to shoot advertisements, promotional videos and other video content, and also operates his own self-media channel.In April 2020, the number of domestic micro-short dramas surged. In the second half of the year, "online micro-short dramas" were officially included in key online film and television drama categories. In the same year, TikTok was downloaded more than 850 million times globally, beating Facebook and Instagram to become the most downloaded application in the world in 2020. Short videos from China have invaded the hinterlands of Europe and the United States.
Also in this year, Huang Xiaohe ushered in a new business, shooting short plays for the European and American markets for domestic or Chinese short drama companies.
This is a series of chain reactions, which can also roughly explain the path of short dramas going overseas today: After domestic short videos matured, they went overseas, and the short dramas that came into being along with the short videos were copied and tested overseas by domestic capital.
1~10 minutes short play, Huang Xiaohe is no stranger. In 2018, he tried to shoot a similar work. The inspiration came from a book called "Study Abroad Trash" that he saw in a bookstore in the UK. It was composed of short stories exposing the chaos of the international student community. "I was shocked at the time. If this kind of short story could be made into a video, a TV series would be born."
had been filming for a while, but the short drama "Study Abroad Trash" still died. Huang Xiaohe said that one of the main reasons for the failure was that the content too reflected reality. The international student friends who participated with great enthusiasm at first were afraid of "social death" and worried about the lowering of social evaluation, so they were unwilling to continue.
This is Huang Xiaohe’s first spontaneous attempt at a short play, out of interest. So far in 2020, Huang Xiaohe has successively undertaken three short drama projects, and his surrounding film and television colleagues have also started to do so. Now when filming short dramas, has changed from a hobby to a business that can be processed in an assembly line.
Huang Xiaohe said that the content of the short dramas he has been exposed to so far is nothing more than localized packaging and transformation of domestic Internet style cool points. Most of the themes are the emotional entanglements of dramas between foreigners, following the one-minute three-minute anti-heroes of domestic short dramas. Turn the routine. The composition of the actors should conform to an international perspective, such as one yellow, one black, one white, one Latin, and a mixture of different countries. In the
shooting cycle, there are also 50 episodes of short dramas with one minute each episode. In 2020, the investors of Huang Xiaohe's first short play project gave him half a year. By 2023, the investor's requirement is that will take a total of 15 days from planning, storyboarding, hiring actors, shooting, editing, rework to final delivery.
As for production costs, Huang Xiaohe's daily income in 2020 is about 100 pounds, "equivalent to the income of a waiter." Now the salary is about 200 pounds per day, which is two waiters, but the construction period has been reduced by more than ten times, and the work intensity has increased significantly.
"You can't make much money by filming short plays," Huang Xiaohe said.
Picture | Short play shooting scene, interviewee provided
In the group of local British production colleagues, there is an increasing demand for filming short plays. On the bus, you can see many British people watching skits for fun. In recent months, from the Chinese parents who brought their children to Huang Xiaohe, Huang Xiaohe learned that British universities have opened new media performance, new media director, new media planning and other majors around short videos.
From short videos to short plays, from daily life and entertainment to education and employment, smart Chinese businessmen are rapidly spreading in the global village with algorithms that can control everything.
"Roll" to the world
Mimi, who lives in Los Angeles, USA, graduated from the New York Film Academy in 2013 with a major in film production. The following year, Mimi and some friends in the industry established their own film and television studio to undertake local advertising, documentaries, movies and other content in China and North America.
Starting in August 2022, Mimi found that the studio’s demand for short drama shooting increased. The themes were mainly werewolf bosses, vampires, gangsters, etc. Out of curiosity, favors, the Hollywood strike and other internal and external factors, Mimi also began to occasionally take on the job of co-producing short plays.
co-production means assisting in filming. In addition to setting up a team for filming and production, it is also responsible for the localization and polishing of short play scripts, helping Chinese or domestic short play companies solve problems such as shooting permits and insurance.
From 2022 to now, Mimi has accepted a total of 3 short play projects, but has rejected 17 short play projects.
"Unreasonable" is the main reason for Mimi's rejection. For example, the overall budget is low, the profit margin is small, and the work intensity is high. With ten years of professional experience in the film and television industry, she no longer wants to use such cheap labor to consume the energy of herself and her team.
based on Mimi’s observation, she found that her short play projects have a low overall budget of 80,000 to 120,000 US dollars, a medium budget of 150,000 US dollars, and the highest budget short play projects that can meet the standards of popular dramas are 200,000 US dollars. Around US dollars.
Taking a budget of more than 100,000 yuan as an example, some short drama companies hope to form a team of 25 to 30 people. The number of shooting days is calculated based on the size of the script, and then expenses such as venue, transportation, meals, and insurance are taken into account. The average daily pay is well below the daily minimum wage stipulated by California law.
"What I have come into contact with so far are all Chinese teams taking on short drama projects. The local film and television teams in North America will basically not accept such a budget. This is an 'insulting offer' to them. "
To extremely reduce costs, Mimi also learned that some short drama platforms, after obtaining the team members, venues, actors and other resources provided by the producers, store all the contact information of these people into their own resources, and then Then, on the grounds that the original production team was not of sufficient quality, the platform re-hired its own in-house producers.
"Many young North American people who have just graduated hope to shoot low-threshold short dramas as a springboard to enter the film and television industry. However, many of them do not have mature discernment skills and are prone to such situations where their interests are damaged. "
Huang Xiaohe also feels deeply about this. The small budget is one thing. Nowadays, short drama investors do not have strict requirements on the quality of the content in order to be able to shoot and put it online quickly. Even if there are modifications, it means adjusting the color.
When they first start receiving short dramas in 2020, investors will spend two or three months watching samples, selecting teams and negotiating prices, and will also participate in actor selection. Recently, the process of early stage checks by investors is better than nothing, and a simple chat can lead to filming.
Even if the cake is not big, it is still an income. Huang Xiaohe said that many peers can only keep lowering their quotations in order to be able to take orders for short plays.
"The investors took all the money, and for those of us who undertook the auction, the lower the price, the more involved we were. In the end, no one made much money," Huang Xiaohe said.
Short plays, low-end manufacturing
Domestic film and television works going overseas is a problem that the domestic film and television industry has been doing but has been unable to say that it has been successful. Typical examples of are domestic movies.
In 2018, Bona's boss Yu Dong made sharp comments on this phenomenon: "The biggest trade deficit between China and the United States is actually Chinese movies. Nearly half of our 60 billion yuan box office is American movies, but we are in North America The combined annual box office of the market is less than 3 million U.S. dollars, and the export capacity of domestic films in North America lags far behind those of South Korea, Japan, and Europe."
Recently, the domestic box office myth of Hollywood films seems to have failed, but The road to sea has always been blocked. In the past five years, the "Wandering Earth" series of domestic films that have performed well in North America, and the two films combined, the North American box office has just exceeded 10 million US dollars. Looking at it this way, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" released in 2000 achieved a North American box office of 128 million, which was the pinnacle and a miracle.
Cultural barriers, differences in the level of the film industry and even the international situation, any of them can be an obstacle to the dissemination of domestic films to the outside world. Nowadays, there are many short dramas that have replaced domestic movies and dramas sweeping overseas, and they do not seem to be subject to these restrictions. In the face of themes such as counterattacks from the bottom, sadomasochism by wealthy families, and domineering presidents, the power, wealth, and sex behind are full of temptation for all mankind. The development of
's short plays went through two stages. At the beginning, the short dramas that were proven successful in China were directly transferred abroad, and English subtitles were added to the original dramas. Then, as AI technology matures, content can be seamlessly converted through face-changing and voice technology. The disadvantage of
is that the content of tailored for domestic audiences is easily acclimatized. For example, foreign audiences are not interested in themes such as son-in-law and mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but are fond of settings such as werewolves and vampires. When force-feeding to foreign audiences, there was even a ridiculous scene at "New York's First People's Hospital."
In order to improve the quality, domestic short drama companies began to produce "Xi Chun" for overseas audiences and recruited overseas Chinese to write scripts, mainly international students and Chinese film and television practitioners.
It can also be seen from this that ip and scripts are a major factor that restricts short dramas from going overseas. is currently active in short drama platforms in Europe, America, Southeast Asia and other places, such as reelshort, goodshort, flextv, etc., behind them there is a parent company that started out as a web writer or went overseas.
In November 2023, the reelshort short drama app, an overseas subsidiary of Chinese Online and a subsidiary of Maple Leaf Interactive, surpassed tiktok to top the Apple Store free app entertainment list, and the "short drama explosion theory" emerged.
Picture | Short drama on reelshort
It is worth noting that although it is to cater to foreigners, when Chinese short dramas are exported overseas, except for the actors, the entire production and operation are completed by Chinese. The "True Story Research Laboratory" communicated with many overseas short drama practitioners, and the reason is disappointing: only Chinese people can write well.
In essence, short drama is not a content business, but a traffic business.
The birth of a short drama can be simplified into two stages: production and distribution. From a cost perspective, scripts, filming, actors' remuneration, etc., which account for the bulk of the traditional film and television industry, are often not worth mentioning in a successful short drama. Even if the industry begins to pursue quality after entering the fierce battle in the Red Sea, the total production cost of a short drama will usually not exceed one million.
But once a short drama enters the streaming stage, that is, after it is promoted on social platforms such as Douyin (overseas tiktok, Facebook, etc.) and obtains positive returns, the cost of streaming a short drama will be as high as millions or even Tens of millions, domestic popular short dramas may even reach a scale of 100 million yuan.
The person in charge of a game company also revealed to the "True Story Research Laboratory" that because he is worried about the future upgrade of domestic control over games, he has also begun to consider the business of exporting short dramas overseas. At the end of last year, the live-action interactive video girl game "Finished!" After its release, "I'm Surrounded by Beauties" continued to top the Steam best-selling list in China, and also led to a surge in A-share short drama interactive game concept stocks. When it comes to streaming, game companies also know it well.
For directors and actors, short plays are no longer works, but products.The production time of a short drama in is compressed to one to two weeks. Short dramas are new products that companies constantly launch under the traffic model. They are no different from the 9 yuan 9 agricultural products and 29 yuan 9 shirts sold in the live broadcast room. Merchants launch a large number of new products, invest in new products, and try and make mistakes. As long as they bet on a hot product, they will be successful.
is not so much a short play that adapts to the Internet era of film and television overseas, is more like China's low-end production that was popular around the world ten years ago. short drama practitioners, whether they are directors, screenwriters, or actors, are just a simple link on the assembly line, no different from the workers who stepped on sewing machines and tightened screws in the past. Wealth and fame have nothing to do with them.
