Since the AI creation of Tomato novels, AI has also begun to enter the field of short drama creation.

China's first AI-generated original fantasy short drama "Mountains and Seas Wonderland", the concept film alone has received 600,000 views on the whole network, and the number of views on a single platform of Kuaishou has just exceeded 10 million, and the premiere has appeared on the big screen of the theater.

Although it still can't get rid of the sense of AI in terms of overall texture, action, and form, the emergence of "Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas" also means that small teams and low-cost video creation have more possibilities for subsequent commercialization.

However, for some AI short dramas, there are still situations where they are not welcomed by the audience.

For example, in the eyes of some audiences, in the face of AI Jackie Chan and "Under the Inhuman", which are integrated into AI creation, but almost meaningful in nature, the early "Love Apartment" will be praised as "ahead".

But in any case, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also to tell stories, AI short dramas are still coming.

1. A short drama with a full-screen AI sense is here

In addition to "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Chopping Waves", on July 8, Douyin also launched the AI sci-fi short drama "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse", which has been played more than 38 million times.

Earlier, at the beginning of this year, there were actually many media reports that some companies tried to use "AI dubbing + face swapping foreigners" to make short dramas go overseas with one click.

By the middle of the year, with the rapid development of AI video technology, there are not only short films and short dramas featuring AIGC on the market, but also "Mountains and Seas: Splitting Waves" and "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse".

In June, the China Central Radio and Television Film and Television Drama Documentary Center launched 3 AI short dramas "Hero", "Love Never Ends" and "Fantasy Store" on CCTV.

Image source: Screenshot of the short drama "Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse".

In the same field, Ali even launched a large model of film and television makeup not long ago.

After all, how expensive the post-special effects of sci-fi blockbusters are, and how cumbersome the pre-production process is, AI can save them a lot of time and energy in links such as script meetings and concept drawings.

In this regard, Chen Kun, director of "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Splitting Waves", also mentioned that even a big director like Zhang Yimou will not be able to complete a lot of CG special effects content because of the budget, which is a huge pain point in the traditional industry.

Therefore, in terms of the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, both long and short video platforms and Internet giants that are trying to expand their own AI graphs are very active in this regard.

However, at present, the development of AI short dramas is still in its infancy, and under the current conditions of AI technology, the consistency of characters, scenes, character performances and action interactions have not yet reached a highly controllable and highly accurate level.

This naturally inevitably leads to the audience's scrutinizing attitude towards AI short dramas. Among them, the lack of coherence in the plot of some film dramas caused by complex plots is the most embarrassing place for most audiences.

However, this deficiency is currently generally objective, and the advantages and disadvantages of technology-driven AI short dramas are on the table to a certain extent, that is, AI has shown strong capabilities in data processing and pattern recognition, but it is obviously insufficient in creative generation and emotional expression.

The simple explanation is that the current technical defect of AI skits lies in the facial emotional expression of the characters. You can refer to the nearly 20 minutes of animation in the film "Under the Alien" assisted by AI technology and transformed from live-action materials.

Similarly, the key reason why "Under the Alien" and AI Jackie Chan will be complained by the audience is that the audience's expectations for them are not low, and they are also the first batch of feature films that integrate AI into film and television dramas and put them on the stage.

If the overall effect transformation does not achieve the degree of naturalness that the audience expects, the audience who consumes for it will naturally feel worthless.

In addition, whether it is for short dramas to go overseas or to provide more creativity for film and television dramas, AI is a good hand in empowering short dramas.

However, at present, in addition to the lack of naturalness of AI short dramas, the difficulties encountered in the creation of AI short dramas also include the creation of high-quality content before film and television, such as lack of innovation and lack of content depth, which are also the core problems that the short drama industry needs to solve.

Especially in the field of AI short dramas going overseas, it is more necessary to strengthen the creative ability of the plot, rather than just the technology itself.

Second, the cost of going to sea is low, but there are many difficulties

According to the research of the short drama study room, the current production cost of going overseas is relatively high, with an average of 13~200,000 US dollars per drama, which is equivalent to 2~3 times that of 40~600,000 yuan in China.

If you swap faces through AI, the cost will be much lower.

It is reported that at present, the basic price of AI face swapping is about 50,000-100,000 yuan/unit, and lip-sync translation also needs to be charged separately, and the overall package price is about 200,000 yuan/unit.

Based on the cost of 150,000 US dollars for an overseas short drama, if the domestic short drama (the cost is about 500,000 yuan), plus the face replacement fee of 200,000 yuan, the overall cost savings will reach at least hundreds of thousands of yuan.

In this way, although the live-action starring will not be replaced for a while, after all, AI Jackie Chan is prostrate in front. However, other job opportunities may be compressed, such as a model release for a real person.

However, this can only be managed for a while, and it is still difficult to fully promote it as a mature product to overseas markets. As mentioned above, AI face swapping still needs to be vigilant against the phenomenon of facial features collapsing after dynamic face turning.

From a deeper level of discussion, even though AI short dramas have achieved a silky face-change, in order to increase the willingness of overseas users to pay, the overall plot content style of film and television dramas not only needs to be adjusted according to the cultural differences of different countries, but also cannot move the domestic habit of copying rigid plots to overseas markets.

On the whole, if you choose to go overseas at this stage, there will be certain risks in its return on investment. After all, the AI short drama that is currently known as a hit in China has not yet been born, and this road will be more difficult to take overseas.

Take the first AI short drama "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Splitting Waves" as an example, some netizens have compared 220 Kuaishou short dramas, if calculated according to the average number of episodes, the AI short drama "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Splitting Waves" is ranked 18th, exceeding about 92.07% of other dramas.

From the objective data of 50 million views, it can be seen that "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Splitting Waves" is in the top 15% of the echelon. Comprehensive data shows that among the many short dramas on the short video platform, "Mountains and Seas Mirror: Splitting Waves" has been called a good AI short drama, but it is still a long way from a hit.

Of course, the rational point of domestic large-scale model manufacturers is that even if going overseas is the goal of many large-scale models to develop film and television dramas, in the face of the shortcomings of AI film and television creation, many large manufacturers and film and television drama directors involved in AI creation all focus on technological development.

For example, large text generation models such as Chat GPT4, Bing, Wenxin Yiyan, and iFLYTEK Xinghuo have almost the same results in the creation of short dramas, and a lot of AI training is still needed.

All in all, with the advancement of technology, there will always be a day when AI film and television drama creation will be officially served on the table, sooner or later.

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