The industry discusses a new trend in technology-driven entertainment integration: people across pan-entertainment must meet the challenge

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During the final round of discussions at this morning's summit, chaired by Thomas Luo, CEO of Pinwan, Yang Xu, general manager of the Technology 1 Live Broadcast Division, and Yu Zhou, co-founder of Light Chasing Animation, talked about the new trend of technology-driven entertainment integration and the live audience communicated.

Focusing on new developments in the pan-entertainment industry and exploring new trends in pan-entertainment integration, the 2016 China Pan-Entertainment Innovation Summit hosted by Art was held as scheduled at the China World Hotel on November 29. This year's summit has the theme of "Touching the Future". Within two days, four major venues and a special event for the promotion of the Arts and Arts Fair will be dedicated. The venue will include a total of 13 roundtable discussions and 30 wonderful speeches. After six years of development, the Arts and Entertainment Summit has become an important platform to focus on industry hotspots and explore future trends. ENAwards has also become the most authoritative pan-entertainment award in the industry.

During the final round of discussions at this morning's summit, chaired by Thomas Luo, CEO of Pinwan, Yang Xu, general manager of the Technology 1 Live Broadcast Division, and Yu Zhou, co-founder of Light Chasing Animation, talked about the new trend of technology-driven entertainment integration and the live audience communicated. During the exchange, Yu Zhou believed that technical factors account for a successful animation work, but as an audience,"in fact, 99% of the audience won't pay attention to its technology. What the audience cares most about is the story." When discussing how to deal with the current driving force of technology on the entertainment industry, Luo Yihang said that everyone who is involved in film, production, animation, artist economy, and the entire pan-entertainment people must meet the challenges of technology, and it is impossible to avoid it 100% and reject it.

The following is a live record:

Luo Yihang: I am Yihang, the founder and CEO of Pinwan, and we are the technology media. He may become the first person in China to directly invest in the cultural industry from the so-called technology media. When we make videos, we don't do things to evaluate videos, but we also need to make our own online variety shows.

We have two guests today. One is Yu Zhou, co-founder of Light Chasing Animation, and the other is Yang Xu. There are live broadcasts, small coffee shows, and seconds shots, which everyone is familiar with. Yang Xu is responsible for the live broadcast business from Science and Technology. Today, I would like you to make a brief introduction to yourself. What did both people mainly do in the past? Is there anything in the past six months that you think is particularly worth talking about?

Yu Zhou: This is the first time we met. I am very happy to have this opportunity to communicate with you about this matter. I started making animated films almost four years ago, and it takes 3-4 years to pursue a film now, or even longer. We spent a little longer in the early stage. Recently, we completed the production of our second film and the third film is in production, so we will release one film every year starting this year, which is our progress in the past six months.

Yang Xu: We officially launched the live broadcast platform on May 13. One of the biggest things for the company recently should be the financing of US$100 million, the mobile ceremony on December 20. In fact, we have held a grand ceremony at the end of every year since we started doing second shots in 2013. Last year, we mainly focused on small coffee shows, and this year, we mainly focused on live broadcasts. Our company can be said to be a mobile Internet live broadcast company and has a lot of cooperation with stars.

Luo Yihang: A Dream Factory Company. But to what extent do you two think you are actually a technology company, or a technology company?

Yu Zhou: Technical factors are very important among the reasons for animation. The mission of Chasing Light is to integrate technology and art to continuously create unprecedented works. Our production team has almost 160 people, and 20 of them are technical directors, which is very important. The second aspect is technology. We use some machines for some shots, and some use data accumulation to find out the rules. For example, the dynamics of hair are processed first and then processed by personnel in detail, which saves a lot of manpower to a large extent.

Luo Yihang: To make a metaphor, is about 60% of the ingredients from technology companies?

Yu Zhou: 60 is probably a bit more, half and half. Some fans may care, but 99% of viewers don't care about technology. We are still constantly improving our technology, but we put a lot of our energy and resources into stories, because what the audience cares about most is stories, stories that are touching people's hearts.

Luo Yihang: Understood. In addition, in fact, you have also placed many stars in the senior management team. They are the publicity company of the so-called star-making company. What kind of company are you?

Yang Xu: When we were established in 2011, we hoped to solve the problem of the playback of integrated media on mobile phones. Like the Internet, we provide streaming media playback solutions for many well-known products, including solutions for many mobile phone manufacturers. In 2013, the improvement of Internet speed gave us an opportunity. Our core management team, including me and President Lei, all had a common dream to build an outstanding Internet celebrity in China. 2013 gave us an opportunity to continue to realize our dreams. Finally, we gradually crossed the border and entered the entertainment industry.

Luo Yihang: This cross-border crossing is a bit big, and solving traffic costs forces you to transform.

Yang Xu: On one hand, this is the reason, but more importantly, we see this opportunity. We also hope that more original content will be uploaded to computers and further uploaded to websites through DV, but we find that this is difficult to achieve in China. Of course, we saw the increasing popularity of mobile phones, and the resolution of lenses was getting higher and higher. We found that it could be achieved on mobile phones, so we made such a thing. Because we have some of our own accumulation and entertainment genes. Through strategic cooperation with the website, we can connect stars to us relatively tightly. Stars also need publicity, and content and animations also need publicity platforms. We happen to have such a large supply.

Luo Yihang: The so-called technology and technology may help you improve your experience, provide a good platform, a good method, a good traffic compression solution, provide stored things and good traffic, but technology cannot help you have a better story. VR will help you tell better stories. For live broadcasts, small coffee shows, and seconds, what updates can these technologies bring to make entertainment more sexy?

Yu Zhou: Have many people seen the VR short film Chasing Light made last year, called "Goodbye, Expression"? Why did I do this at the time? I remember in March and April last year, there was a lot of discussion about whether VR could tell stories. We wanted to verify it, so we made a 5-minute feature film, which took nearly half a year. Half of the production was completed in the early stage of the year before last, and this VR short film was released at the end of last year. There will be a display of this film at the end of July this year. You can take a look. We also believe that VR will have a huge impact on entertainment, including all aspects of social life. It may take some time to make a big breakthrough in the content of the technology hardware, and change the previous creation method.

Luo Yihang: The camera is weakened.

Yu Zhou: Not only the camera, from shooting to performance, I am very much looking forward to bringing a new way of displaying content and possibly telling some different stories. Many forms like this, including games, interactivity, are very interesting to participate in.

Luo Yihang: It is more like the development of gamification, with more emphasis on interaction.

Yu Zhou: With these factors, when we watch movies, in fact, interaction is not necessarily a good thing often. Including many friends who have seen it, it brings many new details, but will all audiences like and accept it? I think the latest technology will have some reactions like this, but it will be continuously optimized.

Luo Yihang: What new changes has technology itself made to celebrities or celebrities 'content marketing and publicity itself? Because I think the changes are great, from Niizai or platform, to a more complex and high-quality platform for small coffee show, to a live broadcast platform such as YiLive Broadcast, using Weibo resources to integrate and connect them together. What changes have been made to marketing and publicity, or the marketing and publicity of performing arts resources?

Yu Zhou: In fact, we have repeatedly said internally that Weibo, Niopai, and Xiaokai Show are a package and are necessary for entertainment publicity. When promoting every movie, you may need to post messages and tidbits on Weibo. There are small pieces of flowers that can be imitated through small coffee shows, and at the same time, stars can call on fans to participate in this for secondary dissemination.

For movies, because we now have the function of selling while shooting, we can directly promote movies, and click on the shopping cart in the lower left corner to directly purchase tickets.

From the perspective of entertainment marketing, we actually have some good cases. Some time ago, there was a video of blue thin and mushroom that was widely disseminated on Weibo. After Xiaokaixiu discovered this, he planned an event. We invited Jia Nailiang and many Internet celebrities to participate in the second creation to continue to make this topic popular. Because Internet celebrities have high exposure. The third step is that we invited Wu Xiubo himself to live on Weibo to further increase his influence through the small coffee show, which can be used for sales rewards.

Luo Yihang: An entertainment event. It is better than mushrooms. Because it itself has a long-term Weibo account, through interviews, this matter was put on the second photo to ferment. Little Coffee Show also invited stars to play, imitating this paragraph, quickly expanding its influence, and finally reaching the live broadcast platform, live broadcast on our platform, including monetization. I think this piece is a better one.

Yu Zhou: From our own positioning, Niaotou, Xiaocai Show, Live Broadcast and Weibo are a package. From the perspective of the combination of technology, it actually brings a lot of ways to play, such as the current beauty, based on Face Recognition. Optimize faces and scenes, and handle faces. In the past, there might be more beauty cameras and Xiuxiu, which couldn't achieve real-time beauty. Now it can achieve real-time beauty on faces. We are doing a discussion based on hand recognition in the next step, which can trigger a small animation. This small animation, such as animated characters, can promote the image and directly make an expression for live broadcast, or make an option for everyone to use. In fact, this is also a way to play.

Luo Yihang: There is another question. The process of digitalization and technology change entertainment, or high-quality entertainment content, or what form do you expect during the transformation process of movie content and entertainment? Let me give you an example. We held an event on November 4th. Not long ago, we made a virtual version of the VR version. Faye Wong's VR version is still quite useful to everyone here. Virtual reality changes the trend of movies and changes the way people live. I am also quite looking forward to this. What new technical means do you have?

Yu Zhou: Actually, everyone has been talking about artificial intelligence and VR recently, but in fact it has been many, many years. Many things will happen. VR content is still tentative content, and this will be popular in three to five years. We are also doing this kind of discussion. But one point, as I mentioned just now, a good story is still the most important thing.

Luo Yihang: I hope I can make more attempts and tell many stories. In the future, I may tell 10-minute stories. Long shots will be more widely used in virtual reality. New technologies may change the entertainment industry. Yu Zhou said a lot just now that technology may bring promotion and challenges to content production. How should we deal with it? What imaginations does technology itself bring to live broadcast online marketing?

Yang Xu: We are now looking forward to a technology based on real-time recognition of scenes. It can recognize that when the camera turns sideways and sees that this is a plane, 3D can be moved into water in real time and added directly through technology. We are exploring this area. Whether we are in future live broadcast rooms or videos, we can put relevant promotional materials into the content, and integrate them seamlessly. We can do it very quickly.

Luo Yihang: I think today's discussion has basically ended here due to time reasons. There has been a lot of talk about this topic. What kind of attitude we have towards people who make content, people who distribute content, and technology, and how much they are eager to try? In fact, it is very complicated. At this moment, our fear has subsided by 20%. We see the Western world, each of us, everyone involved in the marketing of movies, production, animation, and artist economics, has to meet the challenge. It is impossible to avoid it 100% or reject it. The future is like this, there is no way. Thank you all.

Editor: Nancy