Light and Fatigue in the Short Drama Factory

It was raining in Xi’an that day.

Autumn had just arrived. The wind on the Bailu Plain location was cold, and the rain refused to stop. A crew of nearly forty was stuck inside a faux-antique courtyard. The slate said it plainly: twenty-two scenes had to be finished that day.

Lunch took less than twenty minutes. Halfway through the boxed meals, the rain suddenly quit. Nobody said a word. Everyone charged outside as if by reflex. Director Wang Jing sprang up from beside the monitor and mimed the moves for the actors — striking opponents from across the room, projecting internal force outward. The VFX team would figure something out in post. Every minute of clear sky was money.

She had already taken a long loop through this industry: web movies, production coordinating, color grading, assistant directing, and now, at last, “a real director.” Her partner Li Qiang came from advertising. During the pandemic, clients cut budgets and projects got axed, and they were forced to find another way to survive. The first short drama they shot was in 2022. Night scenes were filmed on the roadside — as long as the faces were lit, it passed. Two cameras pointed at two actors, every scene shot twice. The lead actress got 1,000 yuan a day, the lead actor 800, and the whole thing wrapped for 80,000 yuan.

Nobody back then thought of this as “the content business of a new era.” The only thought was: still being able to roll camera at all already counted as luck.

Then came a male-oriented rebirth drama that used a helicopter. On launch day, top-ups broke ten million yuan. The partner called and said: “Brother Qiang, the helicopter money is earned back.” Like a gambler looking up from the card table and discovering that, of all people, he’s the one who’s winning.

In the end, that drama’s cumulative top-ups passed fifty million. One short drama fed whole batches of people who had no particular picture of the future.

The new drama she is shooting now is called While Girls Train in Martial Arts, I Cultivate Immortality, and it is headed for Hongguo. Its female lead dares to look her own desires in the eye — not “dares” in some educational sense; she simply, quite naturally, regards herself as a person who has desires. In the world of short drama, that already counts as progress. Characters are slowly ceasing to be stock types. The formulas are still right there, but the emotions have begun to bend, just slightly, toward something more complicated.

At seven that morning, as soon as the crew arrived on set, Wang Jing began stressing the action choreography. An actor in period costume plays “Patriarch Huangfu,” and has to project the aura of a man striking people down from a distance. The rain kept getting heavier, and the crew had no choice but to rig rain covers; the lights flickered beneath the plastic sheeting, and water dripped off the edges one drop at a time, like a scene from some other film.

This new drama took seven days from first slate to wrap. In Xi’an, that doesn’t count as fast. Some crews shoot sixty episodes in five days, cut them in a single day, and can go online the very next. The dramas this city turns out each year are said to account for forty to sixty percent of the national total.

Five hundred kilometers away, Zhengzhou is sprinting along the same track. A newly built short-drama base by the Yellow River stays lit all night, crews rotating in and out. The government’s numbers read: more than 3,800 micro-dramas launched in the first three quarters, over 800 companies, nearly 40,000 people working in the trade. Four hundred new dramas a month, around and around.

And that is just the surface. Industry-wide, the output is three to four thousand dramas a month; Xi’an and Zhengzhou together contribute nearly thirty percent of it. More than 600 million users have scrolled through these dramas, and most of them have no idea that the stories they watch were squeezed out of this place — out of its rainy nights, its corridors, its rented apartments, and its editing bays running on overtime.

——

The real origin story isn’t romantic.

Around 2019, the web-novel platforms were fighting their user-acquisition wars, and they used the bluntest instrument there is: shoot the novels as short scripted segments and run them as feed ads, aimed at an endless supply of users.

Melodramatic enough, and the clicks went up. It worked so well that the ad agencies realized: if people were willing to watch an “ad,” then make the ad a little longer — might they be willing to pay to see what happens next?

Short drama was never “a new form for literary ambition” — it was the byproduct of a traffic-buying experiment. Later, the byproduct grew into an industry, one that even came back to support the very clients who had once paid for those ads.

Geography played a part here. Xi’an and Zhengzhou each hold more than thirteen million permanent residents, with a hundred-plus universities between them — young people in abundance, at wages lower than the eastern coast. The area around Xuchang had long been a famous hub for film lighting and set power; when Hengdian cooled off, many lighting technicians drifted back inland. Short drama settled its bills fast — not exactly dignified, but more dependable than pining after a big production.

The moment short-drama demand arrived, the people who had always drifted from crew to crew — lighting, camera, makeup, extras, post-production — naturally gathered together again. Only now the frame had gone vertical, the running time shorter, the pacing choked tighter than ever.

Even the monitors changed shape. In the old days of shooting vertical, crews could only stand a horizontal monitor on end and make do; now they use vertical monitors that display three camera feeds at once. There are always rough edges visible in each round of technical iteration — and that is the industry’s true point of origin, a good deal more honest than the press kits.

——

Short-drama costs have been squeezed so low that the arithmetic reads like a cold joke. Two thousand yuan can get one shot. Revenue sharing can clear ten thousand. A small team can shoot thirty to fifty a day.

In Xi’an there is a company called Zhuoyuan, with nearly eighty editors sitting in its machine room. Keyboards and mice clatter in an unbroken stream. Outside the windows it is raining; inside, it is raining too — just another kind, a soundless one. The screens flash with the usual short-drama settings: palaces, mansions, banquets, hospitals, CEO offices. Every emotion gets compressed into clips of under two minutes.

Who shot the first short drama? The story that circulates in the trade: in March 2022, the bosses of several Xi’an companies teamed up to shoot one in Fuping — a crew of fewer than ten with a single cameraman, a cost of 37,500 yuan, and a profit of 8,000. No myth, no legend — just a small deal that didn’t earn much but didn’t lose money either.

The “golden age” was something people recalled into existence only afterward. Mini-program dramas inherited the traffic-buying logic of feed ads; the business simply went from “selling goods” to “selling storylines.” Spend one yuan on traffic and take in 1.1 back, and you had a positive loop — keep raising the stakes until the curve starts to bend downward.

Some dramas, made for a hundred-thousand-something yuan, took in more than thirty million in top-ups on a single day. Profits in the millions. Those who moved early were suddenly struck by the illusion that this was how the world made money.

Xi’an’s short-drama companies spontaneously formed a “hit alliance.” Anyone whose launch-day top-ups failed to break ten million had to drink a penalty toast at the dinner table. Behind these jokes with their boyish bravado lies a brutal reality: hits are getting harder and harder to replicate, while the number of dramas that are not hits keeps growing exponentially.

——

Regulation came quickly.

At the end of 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration began purging vulgar dramas and mini-program portals, and a great deal of content vanished overnight. By mid-2024, Hongguo’s free model had lured away most of the users. Top-ups for paid dramas shrank to the million-yuan level, and the revenue share on a drama was down to the thinnest sliver of skin.

Production companies started redoing the math. Under the for-hire production model, gross margins run between 5% and 15% — handsome revenue volume, middling profit. The platforms cluster in Beijing and Hangzhou, the traffic buyers in southern China, the users inside their phones. Xi’an and Zhengzhou are in charge of one thing: getting the story shot in the shortest time possible.

Some accepted their fate; others would not. They chose to hold their own copyrights, developing scripts themselves and selling the finished films to the platforms. One success, and the revenue share could reach tens of millions; one failure — a drama that cost 600,000 yuan earning 600 yuan, or even 6, after launch — is not unheard of either. The risk that matters is not the kind written into contracts. It is finishing everything and then discovering: the audience never even had time to click on you.

——

The subject matter is slowly changing too.

Dramas built on characters turning stupid and on pure emotional brawls are getting fewer — not because taste suddenly improved, but because viewers have scrolled through so much that they have every formula memorized. Open any melodramatic short drama, and the “plot continuations” written in the comments are sometimes better than the writers’ version. The supply of information has turned back on creation and started to suppress it. Creators and viewers now stand on the same timeline — you can’t fool people for long.

Some note that suspense shorts were long considered “impossible” — the running time too short to lay any foreshadowing. But the platforms have already started betting on the genre. Not because it is more elevated, only because pure “brawl-style” emotion has been squeezed nearly dry.

——

Actors’ incomes are rising faster than the scripts.

Within a year, the second male lead’s day rate went from 1,000 yuan to 20,000; the lead actress’s, from 2,000 to 30,000. Hit actors are bound to the platforms, and the quoted price is a notional number — “priced but unbookable.” Schedule slots are the true scarcity.

Crews shooting short dramas for overseas markets have moved in as well. One company shoots dramas in Zhengzhou for platforms abroad: Western leads fly to China; the extras are international students, foreign spouses of locals, and a small number of foreign models eking out a living in the country. The leads get 20,000 yuan a day, and the fees are still climbing.

Shooting “export dramas” on domestic soil was once judged “unworkable.” Wrong settings, wrong actors, wrong details — flaws a domestic audience would never notice get magnified to a blinding glare in overseas comment sections. ReelShort tried it in Xi’an before; the results were mediocre, and it ended up going to the United States to shoot American productions instead.

But in the end, the logic circles back to cost. Abroad, one drama runs close to two million; domestically it can be squeezed under 1.2 million. The platforms are still burning money on user acquisition, and the content has to keep flowing without interruption. And so the road once declared “unworkable” got walked all over again.

One director said Zhengzhou can actually deliver the big set pieces that cannot be shot overseas. Sealed compounds, aviation bases, car-flip stunts, helicopters… The things that cost a fortune and a long permitting process in North America can be arranged here — as long as you can pay. A small irony of industrial civilization: in some places, fantasy comes far cheaper than reality.

——

The problem of studio bases has surfaced too.

Early short-drama crews shot at scattered locations, hunting everywhere for villas, office towers, sales-office show suites, empty storefronts. Once capacity ramped up, some people simply converted entire floors of office buildings into hospitals, mansions, and private clubs, renting them out exclusively to crews. Tourist sites reinvented themselves as period locations, the same faux Ming-Qing architecture cycling through dozens of dramas with only the lighting angles changed.

Horses and carriages are the hardest to source. One Republican-era scene needed a vintage car. None was to be found in Zhengzhou, so it had to be trucked in from Hengdian — freight included, several times pricier than using one locally in Hengdian. Wire-rig cranes, finely categorized costume warehouses, “ancient city” sets at scale — Hengdian has these; Xi’an and Zhengzhou do not yet.

Some hope for a comprehensive industrial park like Hengdian, one that would gather the crews scattered across the city into a single place, so that moving between locations stops taking such a toll. Others feel that this scattered, improvised, patched-together state is precisely the industry’s true color.

——

A short-drama company in Zhengzhou recently pushed its monthly output from a few dozen dramas to two hundred. Its 3,000-plus post-production staff still cannot keep up, so the work keeps getting outsourced. Per-episode editing rates have been squeezed down to four or five hundred yuan. First- and second-string editors have to cut at least one episode a day; what they learned in school is of little use, and they end up relearning “short-drama grammar” from scratch inside the company.

Meanwhile, Zhengzhou Normal University ran a “short-drama screenwriting boot camp” over the summer. More than 140 students, 53 days, over a hundred scripts written — dozens of them already streamed online. Dubbing classes got pulled in too, with students doing voice work on fourteen short dramas.

The young need portfolios, need résumés; the companies need hands. Nobody paused to wonder whether this was all “too fast.” The times hand out multiple-choice questions, not essay questions.

——

A pervasive weariness hangs over this industry. “Ten hours of sleep in six days” is not news on a crew. Word is that a short-drama actor in Hengdian fell critically ill from overwork; the story comes up again and again on Zhengzhou nights, with little shock in anyone’s voice — more a tone of “it was only a matter of time.”

At two in the morning, with the temperature at ten degrees in the city’s southern outskirts, a crew is still shooting a night scene outdoors. An actor from Shandong, eating takeout, recounts his schedule to whoever will listen: two or three hours of sleep a day. Hengdian is worse — location shoots in period costume through thirty-plus-degree summers. Then he laughs a little, as if he were describing someone else’s life.

Every so often, a flash of humanity appears on set. Someone lets out a giant sneeze, and the whole set dissolves into laughter. For that moment, they briefly stop being “part of the production capacity” — just ordinary people, who catch colds, get drowsy, and make mistakes.

——

Seen from higher up, Xi’an and Zhengzhou are called “the capitals of micro-drama.” But they are really more like “micro-drama workshops.”

The platforms sit in other cities; money flows in from farther away, then flows back out along its set paths. With vast quantities of labor, the two cities get these stories shot, then hand the copyrights and the data outward. Those who hold real, long-term leverage are not here.

And yet, at least for now, the lights are still on. Countless monitors glow faintly at once; the editing software stutters; lines are flubbed take after take; makeup cracks slightly in the pre-dawn wind. Between these details, people hold up one two-minute story after another, offering the phone-scrollers a little emotion, a little relief, a little anesthetic.

Whether short drama is a good industry has no standard answer.

It just makes one thing unmistakably clear: in this era, a great many people are spending strength beyond their health’s threshold to sustain a life that “looks like it’s on the rise.” As for where this road leads, most of them already know in their hearts — they would just rather not discuss it yet.

There are still scenes to shoot, another episode that won’t finish cutting itself, and a hit-dream with one more lap left to run.

When the rain stops, you hurry to roll camera. When it starts again, you prop the rain cover a little higher. No one is truly optimistic, but neither does anyone have the slack to be pessimistic enough to stop.

All there is to do is keep shooting.