Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"what does the anchorman look like? leave a contact information."

At two o'clock in the afternoon, the new virtual anchor Yiqing routinely finished his six-hour daily live broadcast of "KPI" at bilibili. As more and more people followed him, comments about his true identity popped up on the screen from time to time. Whenever he encountered such a situation, he would jokingly reply, "I am what you see."

Daily live broadcasting is an important channel for virtual anchors to advance. It is an explicit rule in this industry that private information is not disclosed.

Different from the live anchorman, the virtual anchorman is a live broadcast form in which the real person plays the two-dimensional image, and the audience sees the two-dimensional or three-dimensional virtual image, while the "middle person" performs in real time through motion capture devices. Like costumed dolls in amusement parks, the "man in the middle" shuttles between virtual and reality, perfecting character settings and giving leather covers a soul, while paying attention to boundaries to avoid revealing personal information. Once the box is opened, the life cycle of the virtual image will be terminated.

The person in the middle is the "core" of the virtual anchor. if you talk about the virtual anchor, you must not be able to get around the person in the middle. How was the man in that born? What are the screening criteria? Hu Xiao, head of the recruitment team recruitment Studio, told Shensheng: fit is the primary criterion for screening. According to the character set by Party A-Lori or Royal Sister, Dairy Dog or Wolf Dog, make clear criteria for height, voice and body coordination; secondly, the career planning of the preferred person, anchor experience, singing and dancing skills can be added. From the release of recruitment information to the final approval, roughly experienced three rounds of screening, each round passed the proportion of about 50%. In Japan, only 1% of the players in the virtual anchor's head player Rainbow Society passed.

Compared with Japan, where virtual anchors have become professional and popular, domestic virtual anchors are still "encircling themselves" and their screening requirements are not high. Those who apply for jobs either regard virtual anchors as a sideline when they are bored, showing themselves and sharing their lives, or regard them as a springboard for advanced entertainment, enjoying the popularity of fans as "flat-version artists."

The people in the skin, bilibili, Douyin and Kuaishou, are the main habitats of virtual anchors. On the screen, they have a highly unified beautiful shape and a variety of character settings: most of the female roles are cute girls, while the male roles are mainly beautiful young men and cool uncles, in short, the facial features are perfect and the figure is symmetrical. In line with the ultimate mainstream aesthetic. As for species, vampires, demons, wizards, anthropomorphic sheep, wolves and foxes all have it. The more exaggerated the setting is, the more they will be able to magnify the performance of this feature when performing, so as to achieve the purpose of attracting specific audience groups.

"everyone is a visual animal, first like leather covers, and then like the right person, in other words, the audience first fall in love with appearance and human settings." Hu Xiao said that so virtual anchors first have a basic character setting, and then according to the setting to find the right person.

This has spawned a third-party casting team, but because virtual idols are still in a minority circle, there are not many full-time casting companies in the market: one is that "retail investors" such as group heads and group performances publish recruitment messages in their own circles. The other is that the professional Casting team of TV series and variety casting is "part-time". The recruiting king Studio where Hu Xiao is located has opened a new business line of casting for the people in the middle on the basis of the main industries such as newcomer development and variety casting. Now the team has done casting for those who have been in the middle of short video platforms and game companies.

At present, the casting service provided by recruitment Studio can be divided into two categories: project system and labor export. The so-called project system, that is, Party A needs a certain number of people to do a certain project, recruiting Mr. Studio to select in the market Shanghai according to the requirements, and calculate the price according to the screening time and quantity needed; the export of labor services is to select suitable candidates from the self-built database of Chinese people, and cooperate with Party A's work in the form of talent transfer.

To sum up, whether auditions or screening from the database, it will go through three rounds of processes, which will take about two weeks. Hu Xiao explained that the first round is data screening. According to the character settings provided by Party A, including animated pictures of characters and introduction of character stories, the casting team selects candidates who match their appearance, voice and age. In the second round, Party A will provide a dubbing template, and the candidate will appear and record it. If the virtual image has singing and dancing skills, the person in the virtual image will also be accompanied by a video of his own dance, from which half of the casting team will be selected and entered into the offline interview. During the interview, Party A will mainly ask questions about personal planning and past experience, and Party A will determine the final candidate. Because of the particularity of the profession, from the screening, the interview to the final employment, the people will sign a confidentiality agreement.

When casting for clients, Hu Xiao summed up three common screening rules: first, compared with real-life casting, people in the cast do not have high requirements for appearance, but pay more attention to voice and body coordination; second, women have more advantages, because female virtual anchors rank first in business value and the number of fans in the market. Third, those with experience are preferred. "re-training takes time and effort, and most customers are looking for ready-made ones."

Finding the right person is just the beginning, and it takes continuous practice and running-in to create a mature and vivid virtual idol. On the one hand, people have to be proficient in operating live broadcast equipment. According to the Qilu Evening News, virtual anchor Xu Anyi's "the Man in the Middle" broadcasts 2-3 times a day, and it takes 20 minutes to prepare before the broadcast, including wearing an motion capture device. This device is like a belt tied around the body. After being rendered by technology, Xu Anyi can accurately interpret the movements and expressions of the middle person.

On the other hand, it is to improve the world outlook and human setting of the virtual image during the live broadcast, in other words, the person in the middle is also the creator in another sense. For example, the personal profile of virtual anchor Yi Qing says "Friar in the late Jin Dan". During each live broadcast, Yi Qing will be filled with some personal content, such as catchphrase and live background, to make the whole person more full. Of course, the phenomenon of people setting up "eating books" (overturning the original setting) is also common in virtual anchors. If the original person's character deviates from that of the middle person, it will also reset the character story to integrate the strengths and characteristics of the person in the middle, so that the virtual image will be more real.

A good-looking skin is the same, and an interesting soul is one in a million. When the virtual image and the person in the virtual image are "integrated", the virtual anchor will be "alive".

Business "alive" means that you can invest in the market to make money.

The attraction of the head virtual anchor has been confirmed in the live broadcast. A-SOUL, a virtual women's group jointly created by byte beat and Lehua Entertainment, contributes considerable revenue in the industry. According to the prospectus released by Lehua Entertainment, revenue from the pan-entertainment business related to virtual artists in 2021 was 37.87 million yuan, an increase of 79.6% over the same period last year. The live broadcast reward income of only five members is more than one million yuan per month.

Vox Akuma, a member of the Daily Rainbow Society's English virtual men's group Luxiem, launched its first live broadcast in China in May this year in bilibili, with big companies' blessing and fine character setting. In a short period of 1.7 hours, nearly 40,000 people paid for the live broadcast, and the revenue from a single live broadcast reached 1.11 million yuan.

The embarrassment of Luxiem is that the "28 February effect" is also staged in this niche circle. The revenue structure of virtual anchors is similar to that of real-life online celebrity anchors, live broadcast is the main reward, and only a few head anchors have the opportunity of business endorsement. However, because the current domestic payment soil is not mature, the income from live broadcast reward can not support all virtual anchors. According to the SCUT data center, as of November 2021, more than half of bilibili's more than 3000 virtual anchors had a monthly income of 0.

And the cost of creating a virtual idol is not low. We can understand the virtual idol as dividing the "artist" into three parts: the virtual image, the graphics technology and the person in the middle. At present, the layout of the virtual idol track is mostly technology companies, and most of the money is spent on virtual image IP and graphics technology. For example, the price of virtual leather cases, that is, image drawing and Live2D models, varies from thousands to tens of thousands depending on the degree of fineness, plus UI design and live broadcast equipment, the cost has to be superimposed.

According to the UBS report, the average upfront input cost of senior virtual characters is 30 million yuan. Take A-SOUL as an example. Most of the live shows on A-SOUL are presented in 3D. In order to truly restore body language and dance movements, each live broadcast costs up to one million.

The cost of technology remains high, and the cost control of the people is relatively "flexible". Hu Xiao explained that for example, companies will emphasize that those who have experience are preferred to reduce the cost of time, energy and money for training. For example, there are no fixed standards for people in the middle to sign contracts, and some companies sign artist brokerage contracts with people in the middle. Some companies sign labor contracts in different ways, and the proportion is also different. However, if the company does not master the "degree" and excessively squeeze the people in the middle or the proportion is unfair, there will be the same contradiction between the real MCN organization and the head online celebrities, and eventually the person in the middle will run away and the virtual idol "dormant".

Is the virtual idol of A-SOUL member Jia Le dormant still a good business? Liao Qiming, founder of Whale Yu Wenchuang, mentioned in an interview with Qilu Evening News that there will be investment in training real-life online celebrities and virtual idols, but real-life online celebrities are accidental and bubbly; the essence of virtual idols is IP, and virtual idols with works have continuous IP value, and the benefits can be extended and superimposed. Compared with the human idol, the virtual idol is relatively controllable and can avoid certain risks, but on the other hand, the virtual idol still needs the middle person as a supplement, as long as it is a person, there is uncertainty, and the capital pursuit of "never collapse the house" is just a slogan.

In the final analysis, virtual idol is still a technology-driven industry, and the industry is still in the stage of exploration. with more and more practitioners entering the game, the future of virtual idol does not stop there: "in the meta-universe of the future, everyone has his own virtual image, and everyone is the one of them."

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:deep-echo, author: Zu Yang

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