《Post Journey to the West》Satellite TV's fifth consecutive championship: AI long drama passed the production test, but the narrative still needs to be polished

The first season of "Journey to the West" - Huaguoshan Chapter was recently aired on Hunan Satellite TV during prime time.This is China's first full-length AI-generated star-length drama. On the night of its premiere, the real-time ratings peaked at 0.3384“, and the market share was 1.7862”, ranking first among provincial satellite TVs in the same time period. The first five episodes won five consecutive provincial satellite TV ratings in the same time period, and appeared on dozens of hot searches across the network. The total broadcast volume on the entire network exceeded 3 billion times.

The series is adapted from the novel of the same name about gods and demons in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and is set a thousand years later in Journey to the West.It has been a long time since Sun Wukong became a Buddha, but the world has one-sidedly misinterpreted the scriptures, and the ten elders of the monkey tribe in Huaguo Mountain have mysteriously turned into stone and disappeared.The fairy stone in Lingshan gave birth to Sun Xiaosheng, and a new generation of travelers embarked on the westward journey to reorganize the world and rectify the original source.

The opening chapter "The Immortal Stone Pregnant Monkey" shows the process of the mountain fairy stone going through 49 days and nights as the glow and sea of clouds change, the rock cracks, and the golden light pours out.The fluff and details of Sun Xiaosheng's expression when he broke out of the stone, as well as the images of the array of heavenly soldiers, the sea of ​​clouds in the sky, and the frozen Five Elements Mountain in “Memory of the Great Sage”, made the visual effects the focus of discussion among the audience.

Production is also part of this experiment.The team relied on self-developed AIGC film and television algorithms and a massive digital asset library to compress the production cycle by more than 70“.Traditional costume mythological dramas of the same scale usually take 12 to 24 months. The drama also adopts a model of ” production, review, and broadcast, which reduces the production threshold and trial and error costs.

However, the attention brought by the picture did not eliminate the audience's criticism of the narrative.

Grandma Qingluo's sacrifice to protect the village should have been an important part of promoting the growth of the protagonist and establishing ethnic emotions. However, the play included a lot of empty shots of mountains and forests and blank distant views, making the foreshadowing lengthy and loose.The core conflict of the confrontation between the Tong-Arm Immortal and the Bull Demon King appears again with repeated dialogue and looping fighting actions.Some viewers lamented: “The picture is comparable to a movie, but the plot is like a short play filled with water.”

Others prefer the slices re-edited by short video bloggers. They feel that the rhythm is tight and the logic is clear, making it easier to watch than the original drama.These feedbacks point to the same shortcoming: the generation of beautiful pictures still requires screenwriters and directors to organize characters, cause and effect, and emotions.

《Post Journey to the West》proves the technical feasibility of AI-generated growth dramas, and also exposes the gap between high-quality content and high-quality content.Visual tools can speed up production, but the tension, humanistic expression and aesthetic judgment of the story still rely on human creation and revision.