Recently, the immersive survival program "Back to Reality in 10 Days" "airborne" iQiyi, which was promoted to the third place on the online comprehensive list after three days of broadcasting. 10 days 24 hours of recording, complete network disconnection and the limit setting of a fully enclosed environment have brought the experimental nature of this new form of show to the top.
According to the program, guests from all walks of life must pass a level every day to get the right to renew their stay for 24 hours, and the game levels include physical strength, mental power, mental games and teamwork. If you fail to complete the level, you will be eliminated and leaved. During the ten-day recording period, the guests had to hand in their mobile phones to isolate themselves from reality, and the stars were no different from amateurs, returning more to the state of ordinary gamers. The login area set up by the program is a closed filming venue, from Qingdao's Liuting Airport to the office buildings and hotels in the development zone, which restores the reality of apocalyptic survival to the extreme, giving the reality show a new audio-visual experience.
At the beginning of the show, Wu Qilong's team drove through the idle Liuting Airport and completed the mission in the empty airport hall, which reminded the audience of "Squid Game" and other similar extreme challenges, enhancing the sense of conflict in the show. Chen Wei, the chief director and vice president of iQiyi, revealed that when he first planned to vacate a city as a filming location, the main creative team searched for it in many places at home and abroad, and finally closed four city scenes in Qingdao to meet the needs of the program. The fully enclosed real-world setting and the unscripted, non-interference rules make it like a realistic version of Truman's World.
In order to allow the audience to integrate into the plot more naturally and get a more realistic feeling, the program has innovated and created a "variety show" model. Chen Wei said: "A drama-style variety show is more like a TV series with ups and downs, and each episode of the program will have an impact on the direction of the next episode, subtly guiding the audience to follow the main plot line." This form of 'de-variety show' reduces the sense of jump of traditional variety shows, brings an unprecedented immersive experience to the audience, and opens a new variety show chasing mode. ”
Chen Wei introduced that in order to ensure that each interlocutor can play freely in an unscripted environment and show their most authentic self, the team has gone through countless brainstorming and in-depth market research, skillfully integrating multiple elements such as brainpower, physical strength, psychology and social skills to design a challenging level. During the filming process, the program team recorded synchronously in four locations, 400 monitors at the base camp headquarters, and more than 70 screens tracked and monitored the dynamics of each location in real time, and the 1,000 staff members of the whole group worked together to ensure that the program could be recorded 24 hours a day, and the original material harvested by the program was as long as more than 240 hours. The workload and editors in the later stage of the show are 4 times that of other variety shows, and it takes 40 days to sort out the materials, story lines, and character lines after recording.
Peng Kan, a lecturer at the School of Arts and Media at Beijing Normal University and an expert in program mode, believes that extreme survival challenge programs are mainstream tracks abroad, and there are usually huge bonus incentives, so the setting is more extreme. Domestic such programs were relatively niche before, but that doesn't mean that this track isn't worth trying. "Back to Reality in 10 Days" is a valuable exploration and innovation of domestic reality show variety shows, and we must always have the patience to encourage innovation in this kind of program, so that we can really wait for excellent products.