This audience is getting less and less satisfied.
“The logic of the plot is hard, the costume tells the scene, the special effects are 50 fen, the editing jumps, the acting is awkward…” With the improvement of the vision and experience of film and television, the “specialization” of the audience group has brought the expectation of the quality of film and television works rising year by year. On the other hand, those who are standing still seem to be the practitioners of film and television industry forever. Behind this contradiction, to a certain extent, reflects the dilemma of the domestic film and television industry:
On the one hand, there are domestic audiences with increasing aesthetic standards and a growing demand for high-quality works. On the other hand, the uncontrollable execution of projects and low management efficiency make film and television companies face multiple problems and restrict the creation of works everywhere, not to mention the quality content.
In the shareholder letter after the release of IQiyi Q1 financial results, Gong Yu, CEO of IQiyi, clearly stated that content quality is the core foothold of iQiyi ecosystem, and for those difficulties and challenges, the way to break the situation lies in the industrialization of film and television.
This means that the consciousness of industrialization of Chinese film and television industry is gradually forming, and the reform that practitioners actively seek will have the opportunity to completely eliminate the chronic diseases accumulated by domestic film and television industry for many years.
01
The industrialization of Chinese film and television starts from intelligent production
“In China’s film and television industry, film-making basically depends on experience, management basically depends on Shouting, and box office basically depends on gambling.”
Beijing Film Academy national film executive deputy secretary General Liu Zhengshan has such feelings. Similar views have been widely held in the industry. To put it simply: The overall production standard of China’s film and television industry is not commensurate with its investment.
The production of a film and television work is often faced with high investment, long cycle and high risk. In contrast, domestic film and television practitioners face the reality every day: in the whole process of film from nothing, including pre-preparation, filming, crew management, publicity and distribution before showing, although standardization has been emphasized, there is still a certain distance to standardized process management.
In other words, countless “artisans” are active in the plinth of Chinese film and television industry’s market of 100 billion yuan.
In contrast, South Korea’s film and television industry has actively integrated with the global film and television supply chain and vigorously promoted the industrialization of film and television. In recent years, South Korea has achieved a number of shining moments in international awards such as genre films and Oscars.
The opportunity of industrialization of South Korea’s film and television industry comes from its outward economic model: The domestic market of South Korea is not large, and if films and mobile phones are produced only for domestic consumers, the value cannot be maximized. Therefore, whether it is technology, consumer products or movies, South Korea is actively participating in the formulation and implementation of standards to make them universal.
Thanks to China’s huge population base, on the one hand, the introverted economy makes the industry has no strong will to integrate with the international industry chain; On the other hand, “if something goes wrong, it can be filled with human resources” conceals the fact that standard procedures are not uniform. The booming development of the film and television industry in the past decade has resulted in the industry’s dependence on basic manpower, thus neglecting the upgrading of industrialization.
When the space for the industry to rise is limited and the industry enters a bottleneck period, the shortcomings of film and television industrialization are gradually exposed: more and more practitioners gradually find that everyone is struggling to deal with various problems such as irregularities, over-spending over time and temporary script changes on the way to release; When passed on to the audience, the quality of the works has not improved for many years, but the money has to be paid more and more.
At the same time, for those aspiring to produce better work, “to be industrial” has become the consensus, and the voice has become stronger.
Compared with the poetry and distance behind the industrialization of film and television, for these aspiring practitioners, the problems they face are more practical: Although there has been a consensus of “industrialization” in the industry, it is difficult to afford the cost of trial and error in the context of film and television profits. How to start the first step and how to unify the standard is still a difficult problem, so it is difficult to further promote industrialization.
“As a hub connecting creators and audiences, platforms are better able to absorb the cost of industry input, trial and error.” Wang Xiaohui, chief content officer of IQiyi, believes that the platform has a better understanding of audience taste trends and a clearer development goal: “When major video platforms form a consensus, the industrialization of film and television will be promoted faster.”
In addition, the advantage of platform industrialization lies in that it can not blindly copy the “Hollywood model”, but combine its own technical strength to explore a more suitable path for domestic industry and establish a set of China’s own film and television industrialization system.
For example, although the industrialization of film and television is more mature in foreign countries, the application of digital technology and Internet technology is still in the early stage. Artificial intelligence technology, advanced digital technology for the production end, it can be said that we and foreign countries are still at the same starting line.
This may explain why, in the shareholder letter, Gong Yu divided the industrialization of domestic film and television industry into two parts: “Industry rules reconstruction” and “intelligent production”, and regarded “intelligent production” as the key to promote the development of film and television industry:
“In the past, we have been crying for more than 20 years, but we can only find a way in terms of industrial structure. But now it is different, with the tools of advanced technological innovation.” “So we’re bringing it up again. There’s something new in it,” he said.
02
The value of intelligent production
In the recent IQiyi World Conference, Gong Yu structured the problems in the industry into the following three points:
In terms of return on investment, when investing in a play or movie, there is a high probability of unpredictable results.
Film and television production process, management problems, lack of rational professional norms. Unplanned emergencies will continue to reduce the quality of the film.
Simple and repetitive work, which requires a lot of manpower to fill, can be solved by technical means.
Iqiyi has thought of many ways to solve these problems through intelligent production.
The first is return on investment. Iqiyi offers PBIS, which stands for “making business intelligence Systems”.
As mentioned above, under the background of high risk, long cycle and high investment, the investment and decision in capital, actors, stories, IP, scheduling and other aspects can only rely on experience. Whether a film is a hit or not and how profitable it is almost “metaphysics”. It is also easy to cause investors to be more conservative, a theme of the work of the fire we will shoot together, there is no scientific investment management tools.
An intuitive comparison object is that DAU, MAU, retention and so on of the Internet products we use every day can be accurately counted and predicted. If we can let the content production team study and analyze the content just like the Internet product operation, and optimize and manage the content of the product just like the product. Those traditional film and television industry difficult to quantify, standardized indicators, with the help of technology will be more intuitive display.
Liu Wenfeng, CTO of IQiyi, said: “With the help of PBIS system, film and television producers can reasonably assess which content is favored by the audience in the early stage of the project through traffic prediction, IP evaluation and other data dimensions, and help business decisions in advance by predicting the final revenue. In the recovery stage after the launch of the project, users’ operations will be quantified: how many users opened fast forward after the host appeared, how many users lost in the second episode… And make timely remedies for subsequent content.”
With the application of PBIS system, the producer can only see the static figures of several dimensions, such as the final play amount and the number of comments, after the content is put online. Every operation and interaction of the audience can be counted and even predicted. This gives the team the right technology to balance investment with revenue and improve quality content.
Secondly, in terms of production process and management, iQiyi’s IIPS, or intelligent integrated production system, can help managers greatly improve team operation efficiency.
Guo Fan, director of The Wandering Earth, said that compared with Hollywood’s highly industrialized process, many film and television projects cannot even unify script formats within their own systems, let alone manage them digitally. For example, the early preparation of the shooting plan, in the actual shooting due to a variety of reasons hit the discount, delivered to the later period and found that some materials need to be scrapped… The whole creation process is “subtraction” at various levels. The plan and the finished product are like a seller’s show and a buyer’s show. Artistic creation is restricted everywhere and cannot be effectively controlled.
The role of IIPS is to unify and standardize the entire production process, so that information can flow effectively between upstream and downstream. In this way, back-end requirements for content can be fed back to the front-end in advance.
For example, liu said, “If a scene is shot one day, the editor at the back end can immediately get the footage and determine what is available and what needs to be reshot. “It minimizes the probability of waste films and lays the foundation for better creative space.”
As information flows through the crew, what was once a mechanical delivery process becomes a dynamic, interactive creation, reducing rework to a large extent. At the same time, as multiple projects are produced simultaneously inside the platform, common resources such as lenses can be coordinated and used by the management system, which saves production costs.
Finally, the simple repetitive tasks mentioned by Gong yu can be shared through IPTS, or intelligent manufacturing toolset.
“Variety shows, for example, have strict production cycles and usually have a tight time interval between shooting and going online. Dozens of cameras shot a basket of memory cards thrown to the later rough cut, even if some pictures are paste, also need to edit with the naked eye to distinguish. But a lot of basic editing can be done more efficiently with machines.”
Due to the huge amount of material and the dependence on human resources, editors have to distinguish the basic work of “whether the picture is blurred or not”. Talents’ time is wasted, and the film quality is difficult to be further improved.
The IPTS tool set based on AI can apply AI technology to any link needed in post production, helping the team to share mechanical labor and releasing manpower to do more valuable work. The same people will have the opportunity to produce higher quality content.
As a result, both upstream and downstream of film and television production will benefit:
With the help of PBIS, investors will get greater commercial returns, and the development of the industry will be more sustainable. At the same time, it will also promote more niche and literary works to blossom and bear fruit.
With the help of IPTS and IIPS, creators will be released from mechanical and repetitive labor and have more energy to concentrate on creation, which lays a foundation for improving the industry’s creation level.
The platform will foster a more healthy film and television development ecology. With the booming market, further achievements will be made both commercially and artistically, and the possibility of overseas development of content will be raised.
In the end, the audience, as the biggest beneficiary, will receive better content and richer choice space.
It is not difficult to find that the application of the so-called intelligent production, film and television industrialization and other concepts is not only a means to effectively reduce the expenditure of the shooting team. As we all know, due to the limitation of cost, there are very few works on the market that can be truly translated into film and television. And in the young users love scattered, stratified today, many films and TV plays have to smooth edges and corners, driven by the flow of thinking to meet the needs of the majority of the audience.
When the shooting and audience expectations of a film and television work become more controllable, the reduction of production cost will greatly increase the number of works on the market, reduce costs and shorten the whole production cycle, and at the same time bring more subdivided cultural works to film and television development, to meet the needs of different audiences.
Based on this, with the establishment of a mature film and television industry system, IQiyi is further expanding its IP domain through the layout of contents, themes, theater modes and other aspects. While maintaining its own content supply capacity, it can further develop the commercial value of IP content.
For example, in terms of drama series, iQiyi has formulated the strategy of “serialization of long series” and “high-quality short series” this year. The former announced “wind from Luo Yang” “Wind from Longxi” “Dunhuang” and “Two Beijing 15” four minister plays; The latter revolves around iQiyi’s three theaters: the second season of the mystery Theater, the Love Theater and the Comedy Theater.
Even so, Wang xiaohui also stressed: “Compared with the operation of tools, it takes more important and longer time to change the concept of practitioners. Of course, we will cooperate with other platforms, Tencent, Youku and so on. We will unify some standards and eventually promote them in the industry.”
03
Respect the content
In the financial data released a few days ago, iQiyi “subscription service revenue increased by 12% month-over-month, accounting for 54% of the total revenue” and other data have shown that the idea of “making money from good content” and “paying for good content” has further promoted the realization of advertising value of Internet enterprises, and the effect is increasingly evident.
What’s even more valuable is thinking beyond the data.
“In the past few years, the feature of the film and television industry’s competition in the Internet field is to quickly capture users and make profits, while ignoring the creative characteristics and cycle of content creation itself.” “This has led some practitioners to use big stars and IP addresses as a weapon for competition, but the competition is distorted if no one cares whether the story itself is good or not,” wang said.
The idea of competition in the Internet industry has led to the rapid growth of the film and television industry, but at the same time, the profitability of companies in the industry does not increase with the growth of market share, and the value and income do not accurately match, and the phenomenon of “poor temple rich monk” is becoming more and more obvious.
“If we could stop and look at why everyone got into this business, there would be some values that we hold dear. Therefore, the industry itself is not simply a business, whether engaged in content creation or manufacturing, is not simply a business, but also really need some feelings and ideals.”
When the industry enters the bottleneck, it puts aside the thinking of the Internet to smash resources and traffic, respects the objective law of content creation, produces content that meets consumers’ expectations, and settles down to practice its “internal skills”, which has become the real core competitiveness of film and television companies led by IQiyi in the face of the trend of high-quality content in the future.
Today, iQiyi has established more than 60 original content studios and 200 film studios, covering different themes and audiences with different tastes. Data show that the market share of effective broadcast volume of Q1 IQiyi drama series is close to 40%, the market share of animation (including children’s animation) and feature film effective broadcast volume exceeds 40% and 50% respectively, reaching the leading level in the industry.
“In the past, iQiyi’s animation has been targeted at young people. With the coming of the era of breaking the animation circle, works for more age groups are coming out.” “In addition to the drama series, animation will also become a key area for IQiyi to focus on concurrency,” Wang said.
In terms of experience, IQiyi has been trying to provide “new content” to the audience with the help of new technologies. For example, in the love Scream party, it explores the party form through the new situation of four-screen interaction. THE9 “City of Virtual Reality” virtual concert, it is the first time that film and television level LED realistic virtual production technology and XR live broadcast technology are applied to the concert. The application of these new technologies is not only entertaining the audience, but also exploring the possibilities of the video industry from different angles.
In the end, film and television industry will change the production efficiency of the industry; After years of deep cultivation in the industry, iQiyi has driven the whole industry to explore the future of high-quality video content through its own reform.
This article authorized reprinted from | tiger sniffing APP
The author | chandler tiger
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