Still photos of Love, Death and Robots.
Netflix’s new animated series "Love, Death and Robots" (hereinafter referred to as "Love Crashes") contains sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comedy, which combines the animation forms of 2D and CG short films. The story is short but often unexpected, and the whole series is full of cult temperament, which has quickly gained a large number of adult animation fans. The production team of "Love Crash" has film and television producers and teams from Hollywood, and there are many independent producers. The whimsy of different styles collide with novel sparks in the same drama, which is hard to imagine in mainstream film and television dominated by big studios. Naifei, the publisher of this drama, is an internet media company that has developed rapidly in recent years, and it is reconstructing the future digital entertainment map in its own way.
Netflix, once a film and television rental company, has made great strides in the field of film and television production and distribution in recent years, and produced and distributed a series of influential works exclusively, including masterpieces such as House of Cards and Oscar-winning film Rome, which greatly challenged and even shook the foundation of the mainstream film and television industry. Behind this expansion momentum, the first is Netflix’s high investment. The company’s latest financial report shows that in 2018, the content expenditure exceeded the $10 billion mark for the first time, reaching an astonishing $12 billion. Netflix not only dares to buy drama series, but also provides advance payment for upstream film and television producers, covering all the film and television projects. Nowadays, Internet film and television is a competitive market, and a new Internet film and television giant like Amazon threatens Netflix at any time. Therefore, it has become Netflix’s strategy to acquire film and television resources and market share on a large scale through high investment.
Still photos of Love, Death and Robots.
Secondly, compared with traditional studios, Netflix respects professionalism and encourages creative freedom, and does not directly interfere with content production, thus giving filmmakers and partner companies more free expression space. Netflix has increasingly become a platform-based company that directly connects film producers and audiences, so much so that kevinspacey fowler, who starred in House of Cards, once lamented that Netflix wanted to "go directly from script to DVD". Netflix also tends to cooperate with independent filmmakers, fully explore Hollywood resources, and make high-quality products with more easily available resources. The most unique feature of Netflix lies in its big data operation mode, which analyzes big data through the user data of the streaming media platform, such as what content is the most popular, and then takes it as the decision-making basis for production and accurate sales. The result of this content production method is that the user’s taste determines the final product. There is every reason to believe that Netflix will test the audience popularity of various artistic expressions in Love Crash, or that the setting of 15 minutes per episode is also the best result obtained by Netflix through big data? If you ask who will know the audience’s taste best in the future, it may be a digital distribution platform like Netflix, which can master the detailed portraits of the audience. It is these characteristics of Netflix that make the content style diverse, and the novel "Love Crash" is possible.
Still photos of Love, Death and Robots.
From the content to the form, we can see that "Love Crashes" tries to show the face of a new digital entertainment industry, and it is Netflix’s ambition to build the industrial chain of this new entertainment industry. In terms of content, the title of the whole work "Love, Death and Robots" has already told us about the most fundamental problems of human beings and Cyberpunk. The core of most dramas is inseparable from sexual pornography, death violence and subversion of robots. This way of catching fans’ eyes is in the same strain as the entertainment industry in the past, and its style inspiration comes directly from the magazine Heavy Metal and its adaptation of the same name, which is also a collection of animated films full of sex and violence. Similar to "Heavy Metal", the drama presents the classic fantasy novel text and different visual forms to the audience, so that the audience will not get bored in the pleasure of watching movies. Some critics say that the core of the play is covered up by sensory stimulation, especially in the current situation that the American literary and art circle is left-sided, the materialized content of women in the play will inevitably lead to controversy. However, the producer’s cleverness lies in that it accurately grasps the audience’s entertainment "highlights", at the same time, it compresses the huge original text information into a short space adapted to the Internet era, presents the essence of the classic text, and allows the audience to enjoy the fun of self-exploration of the text content.
Formally, we can see that what Netflix is trying to create is a new film and television experience that allows the audience to participate.
Symbols of the title of Love, Death and Robots.
The logo of "Love, Death and Robot" is made into a visual symbol logo similar to a gambling machine, which has a high degree of symbol recognition. If you look closely at the title of each episode, you can see that the symbol of the title of "Love, Death and Robots" will also change with the content of each episode. For example, the first episode is the heart and fork representing "love and death" plus a snake totem representing the protagonist’s team. In the second episode, it becomes two robots plus a hamburger representing robot cognition. In the third episode, the symbol is a snake biting its tail, a prostitute’s head wearing a gel coat and an eye implying a witness. These symbols not only echo the plot, but also give the audience the illusion of free and random choice. In theory, the audience can really enter the world of Love Crash from any episode.
Netflix obviously thinks that the viewing order will also affect the audience’s experience, so he provides four different playing orders for the audience, saying that it is only for A/B detection, and does not involve user big data and machine learning prediction. Lucas Thomes, the founder of Out in Tech, an LGBT organization, is worried that this kind of broadcast form will play stories involving homosexual content first for the same-sex audience and heterosexual content first for the opposite-sex audience, in order to obtain higher user satisfaction and subscriptions. Once this form is combined with technical means such as machine learning, it is conceivable that the identity of the audience will solidify its viewing experience, and the so-called free experience will exist in name only.
Still photos of Love, Death and Robots.
In another drama series "Black Mirror: Pandasnaki" produced by Netflix, the audience can choose the protagonist in the film, thus affecting the development of the plot and even interacting with the characters in the play. Just like the random freedom of Love Crash, the audience can enter from any plot, and different choices will bring different endings. However, all the plots can happen cyclically, so that the audience can experience their own personalized world in their own choices. Coincidentally, an entertainment giant like Sony also launched a interactive movie game like Detroit: Transformers, where players can explore the plot by choosing characters on their own console platform. If interactive movie is essentially an upgraded version of interactive games in the past, what Netflix should do is to be an interactive game platform provider in the Internet era, and bring interactive entertainment into the digital era with the help of its movie copyright and big data technology. Maybe in the near future, we will see a sequel to Love Crash that can choose the plot.
With the development of digital Internet, it is expected that the movie and television entertainment industry will further develop rapidly in terms of big data customization in content and free choice in watching movies, which will also lead to profound changes and reconstruction in the entire entertainment industry. Love Crash represents such a trend, that is, the arrival of the era of entertainment customization. With the increasingly accurate operation of big data, the audience will be directly connected with the mainstream film and television industry, and everyone can get a customized version of film and television entertainment. At the same time, the digital platform will also gather freelancers to make the collective creation of film and television works more efficient and convenient. More importantly, the improvement of the audience’s choice in the works also liberates the expressive ability of film and television works. Different interpretations brought by different plots will make the works more open and generate more audience feedback, so as to further improve the works.
Still photos of Love, Death and Robots.
There are also some worrying social problems in this emerging entertainment mode. In addition to the privacy and even identity discrimination that big data operation may bring, more importantly, it is likely to aggravate the tribalization tendency of today’s society. Social media such as Facebook has brought about the "tribalization" of users’ personal socialization, which has led many users to only see the opinions of people in their own groups, thus strengthening the division of American society. Customized entertainment products and big data marketing will naturally aggravate this situation in the cultural industry, and the audience’s own sense of identity and belonging will continue to be strengthened and even completely solidified, making the threat of cultural war go deep into the literary and art circles. These problems need to be corrected and avoided by the entertainment industry, but examples like Facebook tell us that it is often just wishful thinking to expect Internet giants to come from me.
