《Post Journey to the West》Online: What is the creative team busy with after the AI ​​long-form drama enters prime time?

 —Later Journey to the West—was launched on Mango TV on August 31, and entered the prime time slot of Hunan Satellite TV that night.As an AIGC long drama, it puts new characters such as Sun Xiaosheng and Little Fat Monkey into a new story of learning from scriptures, and also brings the participation of artificial intelligence in the production of long dramas to more audiences.The first season is planned to have 30 episodes. The five episodes to be broadcast in the first round will start with the Huaguoshan chapter. The subsequent content is still moving forward in the rhythm of production, review and broadcast.

The most difficult thing about a long drama is that the characters and emotions have to continue to grow.A short film can impress people with one stunning shot, but for thirty consecutive episodes it requires the characters to maintain their appearance, personality and relationship in different scenes.Director Li Dongshen and his team repeatedly adjusted the character settings, lens language and story clues during production. The villain originally envisioned will also be rewritten according to the effects of the generated images.AI provides room for rapid trial and error, but the creator is still responsible for every choice.

The composition of this team of more than 100 people is obviously different from that of traditional crews.The art team is responsible for the design drawings of characters and scenes. The members who generate the pictures need to constantly communicate with the models, and the algorithm engineers develop tools according to the creative needs.Only some people come from filmmaking backgrounds, and more members come from fields such as fine arts and technology.From a text idea to a picture, aesthetic judgment is still indispensable: the posture of the characters, the light of the environment, and the rhythm of the movements all have to be selected and corrected over and over again by people.

The most time-consuming aspects of production are often the seemingly small details.The team once encountered the problem of stiff expressions and movements due to the missing tail in the character setting, and spent about ten days troubleshooting.After the problem was solved, the picture regained the vividness that the characters should have.This experience shows that generative tools are not machines that can replace creation at the push of a button.It requires the creator to establish a clear enough description and understand the boundaries of the model in each result.

Cost changes are an unavoidable topic when AIGC enters film and television discussions.The team estimates that the cost of a single episode of "Post Journey to the West" is about 900,000 yuan, and the cost per minute is between 20,000 and 30,000 yuan.The budget is made up of personnel, travel, and computing power, with computing power accounting for about one-quarter to one-fifth of it.For fantasy themes that require a large number of scenes, characters and special effects, changes in the cost structure will bring about new production methods and will also allow more imagination in scale when the project is established.

Whether technology can support long-form dramas ultimately comes back to the story itself.The consistency of the picture has been improved, but the emotional connection across shots is still a problem: how to naturally carry the hesitation, anger or relief that the characters just experienced in the previous paragraph to the next paragraph is where the audience can most easily feel it.The team plans to compile audience feedback and try to incorporate interesting suggestions into subsequent content.When AI long-form dramas enter the prime time, they really start to face the audience who have been following the drama for a long time and their patient requirements for characters and narratives.