CATDOLL: The industry thinking brought by "Brave Adventure" extends from animation to pan-entertainment

On December 17, the classic Chinese suspense and mystery comic "The Brave Adventure" held its 2016 fan interaction meeting in Shanghai. In the official promotion, the theme of the event was clearly written: Do you have medicine? This seemingly "unofficial" term has won the recognition and love of fans.

Indeed, they have good reason.

This real-name limited fan carnival party was not only large in scale (in addition to the main creative team, well-known bands, singers, and B-station celebrities all came to support), but also the on-site design was quite attentive. The official not only provided generous limited gift packages for the fans present, but also allowed fans to fully participate through the red and blue team PK, making it a well-deserved "interactive meeting". After the 2-hour event, the official unexpectedly refunded the full price of the tickets, and the characteristic of "not taking medicine" was carried through to the end.

Fans who originally thought that they were lucky to get tickets have expressed their gratitude on social networking sites: "I will never regret joining the Yongman franchise!" This is the highest compliment a 2D fan can give.

An alternative domestic animation

If we go back more than a year ago, the official of "Brave Adventure" would probably think that doing so is really sick. At that time, Tencent had just joined forces with Pixel and Nanpai Sanshu to launch this all-star pan-entertainment IP work based on a new IP symbiosis model. After the broadcast of the animation of the same name produced by Sanshu and two seasons of accumulation, a unique Brave Man culture gradually took shape. The most direct manifestation is the formation of a unique fan language. The official found that using such a language to communicate with fans has made the IP transcend the work itself and have more vitality.

The cornerstone of this fan culture is ultimately based on the content of the "Brave Adventure" animation itself. This story, which is based on adventure and mystery, tells the story of 20-year-old senior student An Yan, who accidentally encounters the master of Kui Dao Shen Tu and solves mysteries around the world. Since its launch in October 2015, it has accumulated more than 500 million views and has spawned a large number of fan creations. On Bilibili alone, there are more than 1,000 UGC videos related to "Brave Adventure".

Interestingly, the animation "Brave Adventure" also set up a "virtual crew" to allow the protagonist of the animation to re-interpret the role as a member of the animation crew in the form of a special episode, which has a bit of a "2.5-dimensional" meaning. In this 2.5-dimensional world, the protagonist Shen Tu is transformed into Shen Tu, the boss of "Shen Tu Technology Co., Ltd.", responsible for investing in animation, planning the plot, and even withholding employee wages. At this fan interaction meeting held in Shanghai, the pre-sale H5 of "Boss Shen forced employees to live broadcast" was widely circulated in the fan circle, and interacted with fans on the spot.

The power of this self-dimensional breakthrough lies in that it is based on a set of IP content and derives two sets of character systems, allowing fans to gradually transfer their love from the protagonist of the animation to the official. Fans can not only project their personal emotions on the characters in the main series, but also in the real world, follow Yan An (the protagonist An Yan's role in the virtual crew) to complain about Mr. Shen (Shen Tu) who took 5 million yuan in investment but spent 4 million yuan on the opening credits, leaving only 500 yuan in the budget for each episode of the animation.

These rather nonsensical settings, because they do not interfere with the story of the main show, also give the official space to respond to fans. It is said that the prototype of the story of the 500 yuan animation came from fans' complaints about the special effects after the first season of the animation was broadcast. Now, fans are using this story to recommend it to others.

An ever-evolving IP

In fact, Brave Adventure is not just about animation.

At the UP2016 Tencent Interactive Entertainment Annual Conference held in Beijing in March this year, Brave Adventure officially announced the Copyright Committee, whose members are composed of Tencent, Pixel, and Nanpai Sanshu. This is the first institutional attempt in China to create pan-entertainment IP, and its industrial significance is obvious.

List of products/events of Brave Adventure in 2016

After two years of development, the animation "Brave Adventure" has become a leader in the suspense category of Chinese animation, and its PC game of the same name continues the fan linkage strategy. In the "Just Like That" public beta launched this summer, two new professions, the descendant of Kui Dao and the power of Yu Lei, were added based on the protagonists of the animation, further deepening the linkage between the game and the animation content.

The novel is the foundation of the overall worldview. Even in 2016, when the commercialization of the Daobi series IP exploded, Nanpai Sanshu still made many adjustments and updates to the novel of the same name, "The Great Adventure of the Brave: Huangquan Notes", which shows how much he values ​​it. In the Yuewen selection in March this year, "Huangquan Notes" has topped the fan expectation list many times, and fans of the animation even wait for Sanshu to start updating, and then run to the novel to find clues to the mysteries in the animation. Just after the trailer for the third season was released at this interactive meeting, fans had a hunch that an important character in the novel might soon appear in the animation. They shared their understanding of the plot and puzzles on social networking sites, and their imagination even exceeded official expectations.

This may be the most ideal state that "Brave Adventure" could have imagined when it first launched its multi-field symbiotic IP creation model.

A possible industry consensus

The full layout IP creation model based on multiple fields (animation, literature, games) is a topic that many people cannot avoid when talking about "Brave Adventure". Simply put, "Brave Adventure" is the first to adopt a symbiotic model based on a core world view, with multiple fields performing in parallel and interactively building the same star IP. Its purpose is to create a new pan-entertainment IP by exerting efforts on multiple ends.

Just as China's mobile Internet industry has long been a global leader, this new model based on IP production and operation is rare in the world. As a core member of the copyright committee of "Brave Adventure", Tencent Vice President Cheng Wu has repeatedly used "Brave Adventure" as an example in public, believing that the IP consumption model with mass influence built through the symbiosis of multiple content forms is the potential of the future "two-dimensional economy".

"Brave Adventure" was prepared based on this kind of industry analysis from the very beginning. Taking animation as an example, observing the global animation industry, we can find that a work actually needs a very long period of accumulation to gradually gain a certain degree of popularity. After that, it will take a long time to cover all the derivative fields. Therefore, the commercial value of the work cannot be maximized in a short period of time, and the linkages in different fields are isolated from each other. For example, the well-known Marvel has been around for more than half a century.

If you think bigger, for the downstream fields where a certain IP is authorized, the market size and profitability of most fields are far less than those of popular fields such as games and film and television, and the overall development of the industry is extremely unbalanced. Therefore, building an IP symbiotic system has gradually become a consensus in the industry. The starting point of this system is no longer just to produce a work, but to integrate various links in the industrial chain to jointly create an IP. And establishing an open and cooperative development model is the foundation for creating high-quality IP. This kind of openness, when applied to "The Great Adventure of the Brave", not only includes Nanpai Sanshu, Tencent and Pixel, but more importantly, those fans who love and are willing to support through actions.

This may be the greatest inspiration that "Brave Adventure" can give to IP practitioners.

via: Duyu/Zhao Erbadao

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