Want to know the love concept of Gen Z?
If you go to see the college romance, you will have a good idea.
Nowadays, self-made romances in major colleges and universities have sprung up. Xiamen University has "Meeting in Xiamen in a Second", Tongji has "Cherry Blossom "Encounter", Dongbei Finance has "How Do You Get Money", recently launched by Tongji, East China Normal University and China Media "We Love in the Cloud" jointly organized by the three schools has pushed the "Cloud Love Comprehensive" of colleges and universities to a new climax.
Since the second half of 2021, more than 20 college students across the country have made their own romantic variety shows and landed on video websites.
Colleges and universities have always been the voice field of youth culture.
Once upon a time, arranging a play in a drama troupe or setting up a crew to make a movie was a classic expression of youth culture.
In today's highly developed self-media, college students creatively complete a self-made love drama, which is the output of a high degree of aggregation of youth culture.
program idea
"Talking about a good love on a beautiful spring day"
"Dating in love is something that college students are particularly concerned about." As the two main creative teams of well-known college romances "Zhejiang University Cupid" and "Love Met in Spring", they directly pointed out the core driving force of self-made romances in the face of interviews. .
In March 2022, Zhejiang University's self-made love drama "Zhejiang University Cupid" officially landed on station B.
Different from the traditional multi-person dating mode, the single-person dating mode adopted by Zhejiang University Cupid can more completely present the relationship between two unfamiliar male and female college students.
In addition, they invite the relatives and friends of the classmates to watch on the same stage in each episode, so that the audience can better understand the male and female protagonists from a third-party perspective, and comprehensively demonstrate the sweet encounter and relationship on the university campus.
Although there are only 6 people in the main creative team of this show, and each episode is only 10 minutes long, the content of the show is exquisite and there are many highlights.
In May of the same year, Nanjing University's "Love in Spring" was launched. It has now launched 8 episodes. It does not lose the configuration of a professional team, and it has output exceptionally sophisticated video content. The length of each episode in the early stage is 30-40 minutes, which shows that it is full of sincerity. .
A total of four boys and three girls were invited to participate in the program, and a large number of game sessions were set up to promote the interaction and understanding of the guests, so as to ignite the spark of love.
This is also in line with the program concept of "Love Met in Spring", "On a beautiful spring day, talk about a good love."
content oriented
The show shows a more inclusive and positive view of love
In the second issue of "Love Met in Haruhi", the director team arranged a debate for the guests: If you can decide the ending of "Detective Conan", would you want Shinichi and Ran to be together, or Conan and Haibara to be together Together?
"Debate is still a cultural form that our college students like very much. We also want to present young people's different views on love through the form of this debate-do they value the fate of childhood sweethearts more, or fight side by side with a strange fate?"
The program team broke the traditional debate in which the pros and cons of the two sides sat at the long table, and adopted the free speech mode in the scene of the "Wonderful Flower" program, so that everyone could express more freely.
During the debate, the classmates not only confessed their love attitudes, but also discussed the popular "21-day suitor's code" and "boyfriends go abroad to change girlfriends for two weeks" and other love dilemmas.
"Spring Day" also pays attention to the balance between gender perspectives. They will take the initiative to avoid the situation where several male guests "compete" for a girl, or several female guests "compete" for a boy, "Spring Day" producer Ding Yannan Think, "Although doing this will increase the number of clicks, we don't want to create a female or male competition in the show."
The crew of "Spring Day" hopes to show more of this class of college students' more tolerant and positive views on love in the show.
In one episode, they found the junior sister of the second year and the junior group CP (Coupling, that is, pairing) of the freshman, "On campus, the situation where girls are 5 years younger than boys is a relatively huge age gap, but we want to tell Everyone, don't mind these factors, everyone can fall in love."
Ding Yannan, the producer of "Spring Day", said that the ideal guests of "Spring Day" are some classmates who have a strong desire for love, so in the pre-collection stage, they will carefully check those students who are not clear about their love attitudes.
At the same time, the "Spring Day" program team also guided a positive gender outlook, "There are many students who study sociology in our filming group, and when discussing and filming, everyone will introduce the issue of gender equality that college students are concerned about into the program. middle."
"We will avoid some male guests with a strong 'sneering' taste." Ding Yannan said that this was done out of the orientation of the show, fearing that the guests would be criticized on the show. "After the video is uploaded, if a classmate is scolded, in school It's a social death. We want to avoid that and protect our classmates."
Manifestations
Intentionally avoid "traffic passwords" or classic romances
Different from domestic and foreign romance shows that are purely commercial, the biggest feature of college students' self-made romances is that they don't like to deliberately sprinkle sugar and fry CP.
They are willing to give up those famous scenes called "traffic passwords", just to truly show the love experience of amateur students on the college campus, and at the same time show the love concept and campus culture of this class of college students.
The creator of "Zhejiang University Cupid" told the Beijing Youth Daily reporter that at the beginning of the planning, they found a lot of friend posts on the school BBS, "Our original intention was to create a space for students and guests to get along with their ideal one-on-one. The setting of the links can be carried out around the characteristics and preferences of male and female guests.”
No algorithm matchmaker, no data black box.
The production team of "Zhejiang University Cupid" has implemented "matching" offline from the beginning: members of the program team will manually screen the registration form, match male and female guests with matching interests and hobbies, and then arrange for them to "meet at the bridge of magpies" in the program.
The main creator admitted that in the planning stage, "Zhejiang University Cupid" did not refer too much to the mature love comprehensive model in the world.
Mature commercial romances on the market mostly use editing and skilled lens language to amplify the reactions of men and women when they communicate, such as body, eyes, and words, to guide the audience to pay more attention to sweet details, and then use love to observe The guests magnified the interpretation of these details and guided the audience to empathize with them, so as to achieve the purpose of secondary creation and dissemination of the program clips.
"We try to avoid this practice. Our program is based on the real needs of students: although communication is very developed now, there are not many opportunities to meet and develop people naturally, so someone needs to build a platform."
The creator of "Zhejiang University Cupid" told the Beijing Youth Daily reporter, "Our program does not deliberately guide everyone to eat sugar, but more shows the real process of two people on campus never realizing the secret relationship."
The creator said that they are also very cautious in the use of camera language: "It's easy to guide the two of them to look at each other and smile, or to take pictures of the eyes of the two of them and edit them with peach heart special effects, which is easy for everyone to enjoy CP, but we I don't want to do that, because it would lose the sense of authenticity and would be embarrassing for the guests."
In terms of the performance of the program, the producers of the two programs both mentioned that in the production stage, they deliberately avoided "traffic passwords" or classic love dramas, abandoned industrial saccharin, and tried to show the truth.
In order to show a more realistic view of campus love, the creative team of Nanjing University's "Love in Spring" is also trying to avoid some "love traffic operations", such as "male and female guests should avoid using very influential KOLs (campus Internet celebrities) ".
Ding Yannan, the producer of "Spring Day", believes that "if you choose campus KOLs, it will indeed help traffic, but it will also make netizens pay attention to a certain boy or girl, which is unfair to other participating students."
"Unexpected" harvest
The self-made "Love Comprehensive" barrage area unexpectedly became the most popular "admission office"
Some netizens ridiculed: "I didn't expect that the most active and most popular 'Wild Admissions Office' is actually the bullet screen area of major colleges' self-made romance shows..." Today, in the name of love, campus romance has become a campus culture. and Distinguished Professional Awards.
In the selection of the majors of the guests, the program team will focus on the majors of the students, and will also take into account the interests and wishes of the guests.
The creator of "Zhejiang University Cupid" told a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily that in a program titled "How to Outline Your Appearance When Looking at You", the program team paired boys from the medical school with girls from the School of Art and Archaeology across disciplines. good results.
"The boy from the medical school expressed his interest in art in the program. In his opinion, art and medicine are related. He is not a character who can only immerse himself in research. After the program was broadcast, many netizens were very fond of this medical brother. ."
In Southwest University's "Born with a Date" program, a pair of scholar CPs attracted widespread attention.
The female guest senior came from the Silkworm National Heavy Biology Laboratory of Southwest University (a national key laboratory approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology), and the male guest senior came from the Hanhong College of Southwest University (the school that selects innovative talents).
The professional backgrounds are evenly matched, which also makes this Xueba CP romance show an evenly matched aura.
Using the campus as the location of the program is also a major feature of the college's self-made love drama.
"Zhejiang University Cupid", which was all filmed on the campus of Zhejiang University, showed the unique campus scenery of Zhejiang University through the program.
In addition, the tasks of the guests also revolved around the campus: encounters at the "rookie station" on the campus, milk tea at the school milk tea shop, table tennis games together, cosplay classic idol dramas "Meteor Garden" and "Prank Kiss" to produce "Zhejiang University Idol Drama" "…
All the famous landmark buildings of the school have all become the shooting site. For example, in the 520 special, "Zhejiang University Cupid" took the current male and female guests to fly kites on the large lawn by Qizhen Lake on the famous Zhejiang University Zijingang Campus.
In other programs, the audience can also see the transparent promenade on the Zhejiang large and small theaters, the Zhejiang University Art Museum and so on.
"Because students from Yuquan Campus and Xixi Campus signed up later, we also went to shoot these two campuses."
At present, "Zhejiang University Cupid" has been online for more than four months, and many students who are interested in applying for Zhejiang University have given positive feedback to the program team: "We saw in the comment area that students who want to apply for Zhejiang University have a more intuitive understanding of Zhejiang University through the program, and many students replied 'I want to go to Zhejiang University, Xiaozhe will wait for me'."
behind the scenes
"50 people in the crew have two brushes"
The behind-the-scenes story of the college romance is also an extension of the youth club culture in the new media era.
It not only publicizes different personalities, but also reflects collective cooperation.
"There are 50 people in the crew, with different majors, and they all have two brushes." Ding Yannan said that when filming "Spring Day", the Taoism system was promoted, and everyone really showed their abilities.
"Students who love to wear clothes design clothes, students who study beauty do makeup, and students who are interested in art are responsible for adding fancy characters later." There are also students in the crew who study mathematics, information management, and artificial intelligence, and they will all be on the show. Inject professional power into the discussion.
"For example, at the debate, the seniors of information management like to ask CNKI to see the statistics of each topic. Once the crew and guests played games together, the seniors of information management kept calculating the probability." Ding Yannan said.
The main creative team of "Zhejiang University Cupid" is a group of 6 people from the School of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University. They have made micro-movies and campus documentaries together. They have tempered the "revolutionary friendship" of Qingbi Jinjian in group assignments. ".
When asked about the main person in charge of the program, the creator of "Zhejiang University Cupid" said: "Every project in our group has a leading classmate, and each classmate in different projects also has a division of labor. Recently, it's just that Lianzong has received a lot of attention, but we It's always been a team fight."
This edition of the article / our reporter Zhang Zhiyi
Intern Li Jiaxin
(Ji Kaiyue and Liu Zhan also contributed to this article)
Coordinator / Photo courtesy of Lin Yan and Zhang Bin / Respondent
trend story
China Love Comprehensive "Trilogy"
Nowadays, programs under the banner of "Amateur Love Observation" are becoming the focus of capital and business.
According to the "Zhenai.com 2022 Q2 Single Crowd Report" released by Zhenai.com in this year's "520", among the 4,263 valid questionnaires, over 90% of the respondents are expecting "sweet love" , which is one of the reasons why TV dating has become so popular in recent years.
In fact, domestic TV dating programs have a history of more than 20 years from birth to development, which can be roughly divided into three stages:
initial stage
"TV Matchmaker" Enlightenment
In 1988, "TV Matchmaker" produced by Shanxi TV was launched, creating a precedent for Chinese dating TV programs.
In 1991, Beijing TV created one of the earliest TV dating programs in China, "We Met Tonight", which caused a great sensation.
In the late 1990s, blind date programs set off a wave of "blind date" fever in China.
In 1996, Taiwan's China Television launched "Very Men and Women", which became the leader of the "Crush" of the later blind date show.
In 1998, Hunan Satellite TV imitated and improved the blind date show "A Date of Roses" and successfully matched thousands of couples, and more than 200 new couples met through the show and entered the palace of marriage.
Stimulated by high economic benefits, various stations began to replicate the matchmaking program.
Including Liaoning Satellite TV's "Love at First Sight" and Shandong Qilu TV's "Today's Appointment", there are nearly 30 blind date programs across the country during peak hours.
Generally speaking, the blind date program at this stage is simple in form, aiming at speed-dating success, and has a strong purpose.
foundation stage
"If You Are the One" Makes Stars
In 2010, Jiangsu Satellite TV produced and broadcasted the blind date variety show "If You Are the One", and the new form also started a new wave of "dating shows".
During this period, various Dating TV variety shows developed explosively, such as "Let's Date", "Marriage Defense", "Blind Date Together", "One in a Hundred Miles", "Love Knocks on the Door" and so on.
In addition, during this period, blind date variety shows also developed another trend. Programs with celebrities as lovers appeared one after another, such as "If We Love" and "Let's Fall in Love". The addition of celebrity guests has produced greater influence. .
development stage
"Heart Signal" Substitute
In 2018, Tencent Video took the lead in broadcasting the amateur love observation program "Signal of Heart", which added a link where studio observers discussed based on the performance of the "first scene" guests, changing the single narrative angle of traditional variety shows, making Observers and guests feel more engaged.
By 2022, major video platforms have successively launched more than ten love variety shows such as "Half-familiar Lovers", and the popularity of the topic has soared, and amateur love variety shows have become popular.
It is worth noting that the shift of domestic love variety shows from "simple blind date" to "social observation" has been influenced to a certain extent by Korean variety shows.
From "We Got Married" produced by South Korea's MBC TV station in 2008, to "heart signal" of the love observation reality show, to "Single is Hell", "Transfer Love" and "Eden", which are now popular, all are not. The perspective of bystanders was integrated into the first scene, allowing the audience to participate in the discussion of love and life issues such as "can we be friends after a breakup" through the performance of the guests, which increased more attention.