When Long Aotian turns into Sebastian and Leng Bing Ning turns into Selena, a number of Chinese Bao-zong skits are going viral in the United States.

According to China News Weekly, the video App ReelShort, which publishes these short dramas, has been ranked first in the US iOS entertainment list and second in the overall list, and users need to pay about $20 to follow a series, which is higher than Netflix's $15.49 / month standard version membership subscription price, Hollywood is "a bit urgent".

From the perspective of content composition, in addition to "master", ReelShort also has the types of "first marriage love, sadomasochism, werewolf, counterattack", but the "master" story is the most popular and has become the label of ReelShort. According to the cultural background of different countries and regions, ReelShort also carries out targeted expansion in content delivery, and Netflix's explosion rate is only 10%, ReelShort pursues an explosion rate of 30% to 50%.

As much as it creates pleasure, it also creates anxiety. The United States is no exception. The anxiety brought by ReelShort is divided into three levels: First, the producer's anxiety, the person in charge said that he is not the "master" content audience, "even he is very resistant to the cool narrative", and the production team also has a very heavy explosive anxiety; The second is the anxiety of the main crew, the production mode of the short drama, the concept of the hired American directors and actors has a great impact, Hollywood actors said "the movie is not so fun, you can't be like crazy", some directors said "I don't cooperate with you"; Finally, the audience is anxious, the report said that "many people actually did not read it, more than 50% May see that they do not like it and go", when the audience figure out the routine of the cool drama, whether there will be continued pay power, which needs to be a question mark.

With these three levels of anxiety, the achievements of the short play in overseas need to be looked at rationally: first, the content of the short play does not represent the cultural export of Chinese stories, and there have been similar statements before, in fact, it is closer to the ridicule of "the three subjects unify the world", which is not serious; Second, after relying on "hegemon" and "explosive" to have a certain market share, if the content of the rich and diverse problems can not be solved, the sword of Damocles on the head of the short play may fall at any time.

In the process of development, ReelShort gradually compresses the duration of short plays into shorter and shorter plays, from "3-minute or 9-minute short plays" to "1-minute short plays", which means that in tens of seconds, it has to contain a lot of information including plot conflicts that stimulate the eye and exaggerated and deformed performances. Such short plays can only please the audience's instant emotions. At the same time, it is not only addictive, but also easy to stimulate the boredom of the audience's psychological protection mechanism.

To put it bluntly, the short play is a game similar to walking a tightrope, the left is a windfall, the right is a cliff, life and death depends on the audience's curiosity and patience will explode and disappear at which point in time.

Indeed, from the perspective of human nature, the short play that highly caters to the audience's emotional well-being has the indomitable vitality of the audience, but the audience also "fights" with the short play all the time when they consume the short play, such as the regret for the time taken by the short play, and the rebellion generated after they are conquered by the short play.

As soon as these gray emotions overwhelm the euphoria created by the skit, the skit will be abandoned as quickly as it expands. Therefore, the anxiety of skit makers is not so much the fear of not producing enough explosive products as the essence of the "short life" of the skit.

If short plays want to "longevity", they must, like other video content and even other works in the field of literature and art, provide rich choices for the audience, so that the audience can consciously seek the transfer of interest and the filling of emotional vacancies in the conversion of diverse short plays. In this way, the short play can really find a foothold in the long content competition in the future.