In 2011, the team filmed a "Otaku Radio", which had a great response on the Internet. According to Cheng Liang, director Wong Kar-wai has purchased the film adaptation rights of this short film.
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Reporter / Zhang Shuxin
Edited by / Su Qi
Since last year, the online drama market has become more and more hot, and the "2017 Network Original Program Development Analysis Report" released by the Supervision Center of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television shows that in 2017, 206 new online dramas were launched on the whole network, with a total of 83.3 billion broadcasts, a substantial increase over last year.
With the market outlet, the online drama market has seen a large number of explosive models in 2017. Well-made and smooth plots such as "White Night Pursuit", "Forensic Qin Ming", and "Undocumented Crimes" have been well received, and users' expectations for the standard of online dramas have also risen.
With the new choreographer as the core of creation, Cry Film and Television is a new film and television company focusing on the creation of urban drama film and television series, the editing and directing team created the script of "Shanghai Women's Picture Book" last year, which triggered a large number of netizens to discuss the lifestyle of women in the workplace, and the current Youku platform has been played more than 910 million times. In the future, the team plans to sign more young directors to create and incubate more high-quality IP.
<h1>Focus on producing urban theme web dramas, and cooperate with Youku for many times</h1>
After graduating from the Department of Directing of Beijing Film, before the establishment of Cry Film and Television, Cheng Liang had founded two Internet companies, although both were not related to film and television, but his familiarity with the Internet field made him see the huge market space for the combination of network and film and television, so he decided to establish Cry Film and Television in 2007, mainly producing online short films.
In 2011, the team filmed a "Otaku Radio", which had a great response on the Internet. According to Cheng Liang, director Wong Kar-wai has purchased the film adaptation rights of this short film. The success of "Otaku Radio" allowed the team to discover the advantages of producing short films with urban themes and focusing on the emotional genre of characters, and since then, the team has "set the tone" and will create a short film with a similar theme every year.
The transition from short films to web series dates back to 2014. Thanks to the fact that some of the producers in Youku's production are Cheng Liang's classmates in Beiying, the network short film produced by CryIng Film and Television has gradually become familiar with the producer team produced by Youku, and cooperated with Youku to produce the urban unit drama "Wonderful Century" that year.
Last year, after Youku purchased the domestic copyright of "Tokyo Women's Illustrated Book", it planned to produce the "Shanghai Women's Illustrated Book" with the most similar type to Tokyo City, because Cheng Liang was a Shanghainese and had repeatedly filmed short films related to Shanghai culture, so he was selected to cooperate, and Cry Film and Television provided a choreography and production team, produced original scripts and incubated IP content.
"It's bound to happen that our script management doesn't approve of it, and in the process we've always had a principle that the work should be acceptable to our audience, that is, the elite white-collar workers." Producer Tao Ran said that when creating the script of "Shanghai Women's Picture Book", the platform side hopes to add some dog blood, Mary Sue and other plots that are more in line with the public's preferences, or join the advertisement, and what the cry choreography team can do is to make the plot more realistic and reasonable as much as possible, so as to avoid causing the audience to resent.
For example, as a sponsor of "Shanghai Women's Picture Book", happy and happy to hope that their products can be exposed to the greatest effect in the plot. The traditional implantation method is the product into the camera, but the cry hopes to be better integrated with the plot, so the male protagonist is arranged as a programmer responsible for developing a small game in the script, in order to please the female protagonist, he developed a small game with happy consumption as the prototype, and finally was acquired by happy consumption. In this way, the sponsor name appears as the plot progresses, which is more reasonable.
<h1>Independently incubate content with new choreographers as the core to reduce production costs</h1>
According to the report released by Bone Duo Data, there were 295 online dramas on the whole network in 2017, and "super network dramas" with production costs of more than 100 million yuan are also common, how to cultivate competitive advantages?
Cheng Liang said that most of the film and television companies in the industry belong to a more traditional model, either with producers as the core, or with IP as the core, or with artist brokerage as the core. As the founder of the "science class" background, the film and television company established by Crying is based on the unified cognition and aesthetics of the choreographers, giving full play to the creativity and artistic smell of the choreographers.
"We take the director and screenwriter as the core of content creation, and have 2-3 producers to run urban theme film and television projects, and these excellent choreographers are the core strengths of the company." Tao Ran also believes that the choreographer's participation in the pre-screenwriting and post-production of the project is convenient for a more accurate judgment of the web drama, and it can also better control the risk of the network drama investment.
In the process of content production, the team found that with young choreographers, especially new filmmakers with overseas education backgrounds, they could show better results in the production of both the performance of urban themes and the influence of the later stage. On the one hand, they have more cutting-edge filmmaking technology, on the other hand, they tend to be more likely to achieve aesthetic cognition with crying.
This "aesthetic consistency" is reflected in the "cinematic texture". Taking the "Shanghai Women's Illustrated Book" completed by the new choreographer and director as an example, from the early narrative structure framework, lighting shooting to the post-subtitle, it must be produced according to the standards of the film. At the same time, in the choice of soundtrack, the fame of the musician is not required, but it is in line with the overall "look and feel" of the network drama. Therefore, in addition to cooperating with Ah Yan on "Getting Up Song", the team also invited young musician Liao Junjia to collaborate on the theme song "Say Goodbye".
"Interestingly, a lot of the time during the production process we work remotely and meet online, so the labor cost of the screenwriter and director is only a fraction of the domestic market price." Compared with other online drama types such as costume dramas and action dramas, the cost of urban dramas is lower, even if the youku head content such as "Shanghai Women's Picture Book" has an investment volume of only 30 or 40 million, but we can make a movie-quality web drama at this cost. Tao Ran said.
<h1>Make efforts to undertake film and television projects + produce, and implement the new filmmaker plan</h1>
Cheng Liang said that the company is currently in a profitable state. The company's revenue sources are four parts: script creation and script adaptation, brokerage commissioning of contracted choreographers, production of works, and participation in the production of investment web dramas.
Among them, script creation and script adaptation are the main sources of income, but this part of the profit margin is not as good as project production and project production, in order to win a larger income space, the company will participate in the production and production of film and television projects in the future. Tao Ran introduced that the company is producing the "Genius Game" movie project, as well as several online dramas that are being negotiated, And Cry Film and Television as the producer has the right to invest.
If you want to cut into the production and production of film and television projects, Cry needs higher independent content incubation and production output capabilities. In order to incubate more new choreographers, in 2015, Cry Film and Television began to implement the FirstCry New Filmmaker Program, and launched the first recruitment campaign for new choreographers in New York. Tao Ran introduced that many of the choreographers and directors of "Shanghai Women's Illustrated Book" were members of the first batch of new filmmakers.
Cry completed the Pre-A round of financing in 2016 and is currently actively seeking a new round of financing for incubating more original content, continuing to expand the signing of new choreographers, completing the team's self-replication, and participating in more project investments.