From ＂My First Half Life＂ to ＂Please Call Me Director＂, how does Huang Lan, the producer of explosion stories, achieve a new connection with the audience？
Author | Weinika
Editor | Li Chunhui
"It’s hard for her to run away from him and chase her," so that the audience can watch the last episode and continue the next episode, and they want to kiss after falling down. At first, Please Call Me Director was broadcast, but it was also mistaken for such a routine-after all, it was "900 million girls’ dream" starring Kenny Lin and "girl next door" Seven. But as the plot continues to advance,The audience’s presupposition was broken..
Ning Meng, the hostess, left Ba Zong Lu Ming and went all the way, growing from a secretary to director Ning; However, the bully Lu Ming has been constantly changed and cured by Ning Meng, and has become more and more concerned about others from a mean and vicious tongue.
As an urban emotional drama, please call me director is commendable: it not only allows us to see the growth of independent women, but also allows us to see the transformation of imperfect men, without ignoring the growth arc of any one character. It does make sense that it can eventually break the circle of young audiences, win over both ends of the network and Xian Yi, young and old, and gain reputation and popularity.
"Every time I do a play, I think more about whether I can join the understanding of life at this stage. If you only think about type elements and cater to a fixed audience, it will be easy to split. People who only love and don’t do business are also incomplete. " Huang Lan, the producer, told Hard Sugar Jun the starting point of her play.
This is the eighth urban emotional drama produced by Huang Lan. From The Man, My First Half Life to Please Call me Director, it has spanned nearly ten years.She can always identify the pulse of different times, gain insight into the pain points of modern women, and heal every female audience at the same time. It is always said that domestic urban emotional drama is the hardest hit area of suspension concentrate, but Huang Lan can always produce works with the same quality. What is her content password?
Jump type paradigm
Take care of reality from the perspective of characters
"A life with love, career and family influence is a three-dimensional and comprehensive life. We didn’t extract an element separately to make a selling point. " When Huang Lan talked about the creation of The Director, he didn’t intend to copy any kind of paradigm from the beginning.
According to Hard Sugar Jun, many film and television companies in the industry want to do urban emotional dramas with light comedies, but it is difficult to get rid of suspension and vulgarity at the creative level and give up. In Huang Lan’s view, the key to pry open this kind of urban emotional drama is to start from people and pay attention to the relationship between people and the self-growth of characters.
Perhaps as an ordinary audience, I think that making a sweet pet drama is nothing more than constantly "sprinkling sugar". Making an urban emotional drama is either a routine of Marisol or a mode of selling social anxiety, and many dramas are indeed true. Huang Lan, however, thinks that in the paradigms of sweet pet drama and urban emotional drama,What is really worth refining is the common law of human feelings behind it-the audience needs to feel happy and loved.That is, thinking about creation from the level of people’s emotional needs.
To create a vivid character, we should think that he/she is influenced by love, career, family and other aspects. When Ning Meng was a child, her father failed to start a business with unreliable investors, so she wanted to be a reliable investor and escort valuable entrepreneurs. Her optimistic personality also comes from such a loving family with harmonious parents.
Lu Mingming lost his mother from childhood and grew up under the strict education of his father, forming a mean character of lack of love. But it’s not that he doesn’t know it. He wants to change himself through hard work the day after tomorrow. One small detail is that Lu Mingming is reading Watzlawik’s Change.
On the surface, Lu Mingming and Ning Meng are a social status composition in which men are superior to women, but in fact, from the perspective of inner strength, women are stronger than men. Ning Meng’s inner strength is obviously stronger than that of the male master Lu Mingming, and eventually she is more and more successful in her career. In turn, she helped heal Lu Mingming, whose career was not smooth, and they formed a complementary relationship and established an ideal concept of equal love.
"The road you have traveled, the books you have read and the people you have loved make up your life." Huang Lan relayed this sentence from Zhang Ailing, which is also her creative principle to guide the construction of characters. Whether He Han talked about consulting industry in My First Half of Life or Lu Mingming talked about investment industry in Director, it all comes down to people’s problems and people’s art.
In Huang Lan’s view, 70% of every line and job we do is actually learning social psychology experience, and 30% is the professional characteristics and industry-specific laws.. Whether it is a producer, an investment bank or a consultant, any career evaluation project is inseparable from social psychology. Many times, TV drama content creation just pays too much attention to the characteristics of channel B, such as rhythm, network sense and so on, but ignores the psychology of audience C.
Producer Huang Lan (left) and director Yao Tingting (right)
"Tingting and I both pay more attention to the growth of characters." Huang Lan talked about the idea of co-creation with director Yao Tingting. Director Yao Tingting’s parents expected her to be a teacher or a civil servant, but she refused this stable life and stuck to her dream of directing. So far, she has directed many works such as In a hurry that year and I’ll wait for you at the end of time. From youthful love to urban workplace, she regards the creative process of different characters as the "introspection" of self-growth. Huang Lan, the producer, studied economics in Moscow for a master’s degree after graduating from Russian. Her curiosity about life drove her to take an active part in her study, work and life and experience it calmly. The two people who have a passion for exploring the unknown and a rich workplace also inject their own philosophy into the play.
For example, in the face of a boss like Lu Mingming who loses his temper, don’t take it seriously. When his temper is over, it is good to solve the problem in a practical way. This is taken care of by Ning Meng. Usually, when we are angered, we often don’t see the whole picture.
From My First Half Life to Please Call me Director.
Grasp the social symptoms of women
Huang Lan’s past ten works, whether ancient or modern, are mostly discussed by outsiders. At present, the creation of film and television dramas coincides with the trend of "her theme", and various dramas under the banner of women’s independent consciousness emerge one after another. Huang Lan is a pioneer who set foot in "her theme" ten years ago.
"From the past to the present, women’s consciousness has changed significantly." Huang Lan said,In fact, every work is aimed at the awakening of women’s consciousness in a specific society, more like the right medicine.
Tan Yunxian in Biography of the Female Doctor and Ru Yi in Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace were vague about women’s self-awareness at first, which was caused by the long-term shackles of ancient ethics.
Tan Yunxian was born in a medical family, but her career as a doctor was constantly suppressed by her father and society. At first, she obeyed many restrictions on women’s career as a doctor. Later, she defied rumors and resisted secular prejudice, and pioneered the establishment of a female medical system.
Under the inspiration of Lang Shining, Ru Yi realized the concept of "one couple for life", that is, the modern concept of "monogamy". In the end, Ru Yi experienced the process from love to separation in her "marriage" with the emperor, and she rebelled against the harem system by cutting her hair to represent her determination to "divorce". And different from other court plays, harem concubines are like authoritative guardians.In Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace, every woman around the emperor resisted to varying degrees.
The audience can see the social injustice to women from Biography of the Female Doctor and the Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace. At the same time, they can see that the heroines don’t just suffer from it without knowing it, but they stick to their principles by fighting. But when it comes to Luo Zijun in the urban emotional drama My First Half Life and Xia Bing in The Story of Hot Mom, the female consciousness is no longer vague, but it has undergone a change.
Luo Zijun was a rich wife who enjoyed happiness at first, and experienced changes in marriage. After divorce, she began to change and gradually grew into a self-reliant career woman. At first, Xia Bing was a female white-collar worker who didn’t know anything about the world and went her own way. After getting married and having children, in the conflict between her mother-in-law and her husband’s emotional changes, she gradually converged and found a balance between family life and the principle of self-care.
In "My First Half Life" and "The Story of Hot Mom", we can see that women’s roles leave marriage and enter the social adaptation process of marriage, and women’s focus is still on the balance between career and family.By 2022, when Ning Meng was in The Director, the female consciousness was completely unambiguous and unchanged. From the beginning, she got rid of the emotional bondage and made clear her career goals in life.
Huang Lan believes that Ning Meng has won the recognition of so many female audiences because she not only represents the image of 20+ young girls now-they are not bound by traditional concepts and have a more determined self; Let 30+ mature women project their ideal self-an ordinary girl with no background, and strive to pursue her goals in life and work, realizing a double harvest of career and love.
Huang Lan’s works have been infused with female consciousness in line with the background in different times, hitting the emotional point of social topics and grasping the common emotional needs of women of different ages. The female consciousness in film and television works is not to resist for the sake of resistance, but to extract the most representative behaviors based on careful observation of society and then inject them into creation.
There is a bridge in "Director" that is deeply impressed by Hard Sugar Jun. Ning Meng has been bringing tea and water to her boss, but Su Weiran, the second man, offered to pour water for her. It’s just like Sha, a housewife who has served her husband for a long time, is tied by another man, which implies that society is accustomed to women’s constant efforts and takes care of women’s feelings that need to be cared for.
Maintain a "heart-to-heart" with the audience.
In the eyes of the audience, TV series is an entertainment consumer product. From the perspective of the platform, TV series is a content product. As a producer, Huang Lan thinks that TV series is a "spiritual product".
"Hearts are connected" is the production goal that Huang Lan has been pursuing, and her own company is named after it. "Hearts are in harmony" means that she hopes to maintain a symbiotic and co-creation relationship with creators, producers, platforms and audiences. As a producer, she pursues the consensus with creators, producers and platforms, but at the same time, she does not forget the empathy with the audience.
Huang Lan didn’t want to stop here after trading a number of explosive urban emotions and costume dramas.She has a new cooperation with her old club, Xinli Media-the brand of "New Linxi" controlled by Xinli Media was established, and the name of the former company was changed from "Heart with Linxi" to "New".
"New" not only represents Xinli Media, but also represents an innovative spirit. Huang Lan wants to do something different with Xinli Media.
From the beginning of its establishment in 2007, in the past 15 years, Xinli Media has not been confined to a single track, and has produced one boutique drama after another in multiple drama types. In addition to the classic urban dramas "The Story of Hot Mom", "The Man" and "My First Half Life" mentioned above, there are also works adapted from serious literature, such as Parents’ Love and White Deer Plain. In terms of spy war dramas, Xinli used to have classic Kite and Cliff, and in recent two years, she also had Rebel with young voice and poetic aesthetics, and innovated the spy war work "The Wind Rises in Longxi". In the adaptation of male-frequency IP, Joy of Life’s "My Widow" and "Fighting the Mainland" succeeded in this year’s "Fierce Knife in the Snow", which broke the argument that male-frequency IP is dead.
Huang Lan believes that artistic creation is doomed to failure if it is only repeated. The audience who have studied film theory must remember the golden rule of Hollywood genre film research: genre creation follows the principle of "periodic change", that is, every once in a while, a new "main genre" becomes the mainstream. Because there are two characteristics of audience psychology: conservatism and variability, on the one hand, the audience is willing to get the same emotional satisfaction in the same type of paradigm. On the other hand, curiosity also drives the audience to pursue novelty. A type of repetition and follow-up production will always usher in the burnout period of the audience.
"Only by constantly pushing yourself forward." In Huang Lan’s view, creators should have such consciousness. Of course, the innovation represented by "going forward" will make the platform and audience feel insecure. The platform will question whether I can buy a new product, and the audience will also question whether I will waste my time and money when I buy a new product.
However, through years of experience in fighting side by side with Xinli Media, Huang Lan and Xinli proved themselves with one work after another. Next, the "New Linxi" brand not only has an explosive IP sequel, but also a juvenile costume drama different from previous works.
"There is no repetition in form, but the philosophy is the same." Huang Lan concluded that no matter in the past or at present, her tacit creative ideas with Xinli Media are based on observing people’s hearts, observing the relationship between people, recording the individual’s fate in the great era, and responding to the ever-changing theme with the unchanging ideas. The pursuit of "new spirit" is the return to people-oriented creation. In recent years, the channels of TV dramas have changed, the types of market mainstays have changed, and the mainstream aesthetics of the audience have changed. Only the human characteristics and emotional needs remain unchanged. Insight into people is the key to the audience of TV dramas.