This article comes from the WeChat public account: Yiyu Observation (ID: yiyuguancha), written by Lu Ke.

AI bloggers on the short video platform are becoming more and more popular. The frequency of evaluation of new models and new tools by one group is accelerating, while another group of people who have entered the field of AI creation are also moving closer to the professional standards of film and television creation.

In this round of competition, film and television majors have a particularly strong presence.

In the Douyin AI Creation Competition that ended in September, the gold medal was won by “Helong” by “2XLabs”. This team has more than ten years of experience in the film and television industry. The author of “Standing Up Shadow”, the silver award-winning work “No Time to Live Anyway”, has previously worked in directing, photography, screenwriting and lighting, and has also taught photography and film and television courses in colleges.

The same is true for “DiDi_OK” on station B.

He is an animation major and worked in advertising and visual work at the London advertising giant WPP Group. This year, he won the first prize in the open track of Bilibili’s first AI creation competition with “Pai”. In September, he launched a new work “Candy”. In the same month, his other work “Website” won the “Reply AI Studios Award” and the “WeShort Audience Choice Award” at the Reply AI Film Festival held in Venice.

For AI bloggers, model updates are important, but how far a film can go depends increasingly on the creative skills of the person using the tool. It can even be said that the AI ​​creation circle is about to become a “big gathering of film and television professionals.”

01 The AI ​​circle begins the “Beijing Film Festival Gathering”

Today, the atmosphere in the AI ​​circle is different from what it was a few months ago.

In the first half of this year, when works such as “All Creatures” and “Laid Off Girl” were released one after another, the most exciting keyword in the industry was “lowering the threshold.” One person, a computer, and a few AI tools can complete the work that in the past required screenwriters, directors, photographers, artists, actors, and post-production to work together.

This kind of imagination of “one person is a crew” indeed formed the earliest attraction of AI videos, and “The Girl Who Was Cut” is one of the typical examples. Director Fei Feifei worked as a model for 7 years, and later transitioned into a short video and plot account director. She wrote her modeling experience into the story of Fang Taozi, the protagonist of “Laid Off Girl”, and used a small team of less than 5 people to create an AI series with hundreds of millions of views.

“The Girl Who Was Cut” stills

But if you continue to look back, you will find that the competition in AI video is entering the next stage – when everyone can shoot, why can some people shoot better?

A very straightforward answer is that more and more people who have actually worked in film and television are beginning to end.

In this year’s first AI creation competition at Bilibili, director and screenwriter Ming Shouyi Xiaoxing teamed up with the AI ​​creation team “Fen Mo” to make “The Death of Nuwa”, and finally won the third prize in the open track. This film does not blindly pursue the high-definition and realism that AI is best at. Instead, it chooses a clay freeze-frame style with a rough hand feeling: Nuwa kneads clay to create a human, and the picture itself seems to be shaped bit by bit from clay. In order to serve this setting, the team followed the logic of a complete short film from script and visual style to storyboarding, generation, and editing, instead of first generating a batch of beautiful pictures and then figuring out how to put them together.

Screenshot of “The Death of Nuwa”

Another group of younger creators also put the script content in a more important position than the AI ​​graphics.

For example, “Invincible Star Orange” from Communication University of China participated in the AI ​​Animation Hackathon in May this year and was required to complete an animated short film “Dream Catcher” of more than 200 seconds in 36 hours. But in the first few hours after receiving the title, they did not rush to “run the drawing”. Instead, they kept debating the direction of the script, the core of the story and the relationship between the characters. It was not until the afternoon that the plan was officially finalized. Only then did we enter the character and scene asset generation and editing stages. Finally, “Dream Catcher” was shortlisted for the AIGC recommendation unit of the supporting event of the 38th Popular Film Hundred Flowers Awards.

But in fact, this kind of specialization does not only mean that there are more and more professional directors, but also means that the organization method of AI creators themselves is getting closer and closer to a compressed version of the crew.

Some people are better at commercial advertising and post-production, while others prefer realistic themes and take on directing work. When encountering problems that cannot be solved by AI for the time being, we will not insist on “everything must be generated by AI”, but directly return to traditional tools such as PS. This is slightly different from the early narrative of “one person and one computer can shoot a movie”.

It can be said that in the past, the most conspicuous label for an AI blogger was “whether he can use AI”, but now this matter is rapidly being reduced to a basic threshold. What really widens the gap begins to become another set of older standards – whether the story is true, whether the characters have memory points, why the shots are cut like this, whether the visual style can serve the content, and whether the audience is willing to continue watching after ten minutes.

02 The stronger the AI, the more valuable “professionalism” is

In May of this year, Yiyu Observation (ID: yiyuguancha), the most popular AI blogger on Dou Kuai Hong B, is making money? ” has sorted out a group of AI creators.

At that time, AI blogger was still a very broad concept. Some people do tool reviews, some do AI skits, some run virtual humans, and some make money by selling courses, self-developed products, and platform incentives. At that time, the industry had begun to shift from technological dividends to “deep content cultivation”, but a large number of creators could still rely on new tools, new gameplay, and new styles of painting to gain attention.

Just a few months later, this logic took another step forward. Behind this is the fact that AI tools are rapidly becoming more and more egalitarian.

A model update today, a lot of tutorials will appear tomorrow. A new camera movement, transition or character consistency gameplay may become a standard action that creators can copy in a few days. The “technical barriers” that took a long time to study in the past are increasingly easy to be eliminated in the next round of model upgrades.

This is why it has become increasingly difficult to create hits by relying solely on “AI sense”. The winning entries in the Douyin AI Creation Competition have verified this to some extent.

“Don’t Eat Mustard”, the director of the competition’s silver-medal film “Fei Yao Zai”, has been engaged in photography and editing. In order to determine the ancient and strange temperament of the work, he specialized in studying the old versions of “Liao Zhai” and “The Legend of the Eight Immortals”, and even looked at the craftsmanship and carvings of ancient furniture. If the storyboards given by AI didn’t meet the requirements, I would remove the shots, fix the scene, and deliberately slow down the camera movements to keep the audience in the mood of the story.

This aesthetic must also be supported by expression. “Fei Yao Zai” uses ghosts and monsters to talk about real-life issues such as cyber violence and trafficking. The characters’ situations are the entrance to the audience’s empathy. An ancient house can also be generated. Why the characters should meet here and how long the camera should stay still have to be decided by the creator.

The cases on Xiaohongshu also explain this professional ability more concretely.

Yiyu Observation (ID: yiyuguancha) introduced director Shan Yin in the article “The New Generation of Directors Are Growing Out of Xiaohongshu”. He also won the Xiaohongshu Short Film Rising Star Potato. He wrote his anxiety about switching between multiple identities in the AI ​​short film “A Ming’s Day”. People can obtain different personalities from the automatic personality vending machine, but A Ming is always an ordinary person who is struggling to cope with external demands. The absurd setting corresponds to the familiar emotions in life, and AI gives this idea a visible shape.

Shanyin mentioned in the interview that to express sadness, you cannot just give the AI ​​an emotional label, but also break it down into specific expressions and actions. Prompt words are written effectively because the creator first knows how to present emotions. This basic skill of screenwriting, which was originally used to communicate with directors and actors, has been replaced with another tool and is still effective.

These make the meaning of “professional” clear, which includes both narrative and audiovisual expression, as well as the ongoing management of the role. Professional training and industry experience can provide accumulation, and non-professional creators can also learn in practice. The standard of judgment ultimately comes down to the work. The more steps the model completes for you, the more you need to know which results are worth keeping and which ones must be overturned.

Looking back on the past six months, from “All Creatures” and “Laid Off Girl” to “Helong” and “Candy”, AI video can no longer be simply classified as a “technical experiment”.

It has begun to truly enter the evaluation system of the content industry. Audiences will not automatically watch a work for five more minutes just because it uses a more advanced model. The platform will not give a character more life just because the prompt words are written more complexly. A series of videos will not become an IP just because there are enough episodes.

AI once promised that “everyone can make movies.” Now, to some extent, this has been half achieved. Cameras, special effects studios, and huge crews are no longer insurmountable thresholds.