The reason why I want to talk about virtual idols is because I have recently entered a new trap of virtual idols. This virtual idol is called Kizuna Ai, also known as Ai-chan. Some people also use her name on YouTube A.I Channel call her. Of course, more friends like to call her "artificially retarded". Regarding this virtual idol, we will discuss it in detail in a later article.
Let’s first define what a virtual idol is. To understand what a virtual idol is, we must first understand what an idol is.
The definition of an idol varies greatly in different countries.
In the West, idols are generally defined as artists who rely on charm to win. In Japan, idols are closer to a professional positioning. They are a specific artist who often has one or more artist skills such as singer, actor, variety show, voice actor, etc., and is a very popular artist among teenagers. In South Korea and China, idols are closer to the position of "young pop stars".
In general
Idols are a category of artists who mainly rely on their own charm, possess one or more artist skills, and are popular among teenagers.
Then the concept of virtual idols can be divided into a broad sense and a narrow sense:
In a broad sense, virtual idols refer to all idol artists who do not show their real images.
Virtual idols in a narrow sense refer to idol artists who present performance content in a complete virtual image and are not based on real-person image elements.
From a broad perspective, all "idol artists" are actually "virtual", because each artist is professionally packaged, and all the content they present is planned by the program. , professional acting and editing, the empathy of a large number of film and television or variety show characters, the commercial packaging of the agency and the spontaneous fanaticism of fans to create an "unreal" image. What fans pursue is a carefully packaged image, which is more or less different from the "idol himself".
Most of the virtual idols everyone is talking about today are virtual idols in a narrow sense.
When we talk about virtual idols, many people’s first reaction is definitely Hatsune Miku.
I won’t do any specific science popularization about Hatsune. Various domestic start-up companies that make virtual idols and various media that tout the booming development of two-dimensional culture have already done a lot of science popularization about Hatsune. alright. So much so that a friend told me that "The most profitable artist in Japan is Hatsune Miku."
I am actually quite non-committal about this conclusion.
I don’t know how much Hatsune Miku earns in a year. According to rumors, it may be 600 million yen per year (about 40 million yuan, this figure has not been confirmed). It sounds like this number is not small. Generally, the income of domestic first-tier idols is about this amount in a year.
The income structure that makes up this income is actually similar to that of ordinary real-life idols. It generally includes: acting work (concerts, variety show announcements), work sales (record sales, film and television box office) , advertising endorsements, games (for real people, it is game endorsements, counted in advertising), peripherals and other derivative image authorizations.
But in fact, if according to my definition of virtual idols, idol artists who present performance content in a complete virtual image and are not based on real image elements, according to this standard, there are actually many virtual idols. .
For example, Pikachu. According to rumors, the value of Pikachu's image licensing for one year is as high as 100 billion yen (equivalent to RMB 7 billion, this figure has not been confirmed) every year.
Okay, someone is going to say, you are cheating by bringing a Pikachu over. How can Pikachu be considered a virtual idol?
Why can’t Pikachu count?
If I describe Pikachu as "a virtual artist whose main acting job is to appear in film and television dramas and play game characters", and understand it this way, it is the same as Miku "a virtual artist whose main acting job is to sing and dance" The definition of "working virtual artist" is no different. And Pikachu’s income composition is the same as Miku’s.
Let me emphasize that the reason why I talk like this is not to make a point.
This question very profoundly points to another question: Do we have to define virtual idols as "idol singers" made with virtual software?
Rationally speaking, obviously this is not the actual situation. It’s just that the first virtual idol that attracted our attention to the concept of virtual idols happened to be the virtual singer Hatsune Miku produced by virtual voice software.
Any form of content should become a platform that can carry idols.
Both virtual idols and real idols mainly rely on their own charm to manage their fan groups, but the difference is that real idols are living people, so although we still contact them through their performance content We can't see them, but we still know very well in our hearts that these are people who really exist in the world. The virtual idol exists entirely on a personified virtual image, and this virtual image completely relies on content. In other words, if a virtual idol stops producing content, the virtual idol will cease to live.
Fortunately, content is actually a very huge concept, and the forms of content are also diverse.
I mentioned in several previous articles that the so-called content or information flow is essentially the information flow formed after the information elements are encoded and encrypted according to certain encoding rules. I drew four quadrants based on whether the presentation of the information flow is "concrete and figurative" and whether the coding rules adopted are mainly "narrative", and then classified the different contents.
From this classification, we can find that Hatsune Miku is actually an idol whose main content platform is "music", "dance", "concert" and "MV". Most of her content is based on non-narrative "variety shows" with more concrete expressions.
If we put Pikachu in, then Mr. Pikachu is an idol whose main content carrying platform is "games", "cartoons", "movies", "comics" and "emoticons".
Similarly, for example, Kumamon is an idol whose main content carrying platform is "emoticons", "advertisements", "short videos" and "variety shows".
We can give many more such examples. It can be placed on almost any avatar we are familiar with.
To some extent, artists and content have a mutual relationship. Idol artists participate in the production of content, and by consuming content, audiences develop empathy for the idol artists' participation in the content, feel the charm of the idols, and then empathize and become fans of the idols.
This process of empathy is the process of the audience consuming content, and it is also the most important process of idol creation. At this time, we will find that different types of content play different roles in the process of idol creation. Generally follow this rule:
1. The more the content format tends to be narrative expression, the easier it will be to transfer the personality traits of the characters in the story to the artists (including virtual artists). On the contrary, the more the content is expressed in a variety show, the easier it will be to show the personality of the artist.
2. The more content forms tend to be abstract expressions, the more it will be necessary to mobilize the audience's own imagination, and the interpretation of the artists displayed in the content will be more subjective. On the contrary, the more concrete the content form is, the more objectively it will show the charm of the idol itself.
3. The content form that tends towards narrative expression will be closer to a form that can generate direct content income. The more the content format tends to be expressed in variety shows, the closer it will be to the main focus of advertising revenue, and the content will be more inclined to serve social services.
4. The production cost of content that tends to be more concrete expression and narrative will be higher, and the production of content is more likely to rely on PGC. Content production costs that tend to be more abstract expression and variety shows will be lower, and content production is more likely to rely on UGC.
According to this rule, it is not difficult to find that creating a virtual idol will require a lot of production content, so choosing variety shows and abstract expressions that favor UGC will result in lower costs. At the same time, because virtual idols are different from real idols, the personality shaping of virtual idols completely relies on the production of content. Therefore, if you want to better show the personality charm of virtual idols, you will be more inclined to produce more variety show expressions and concrete expressions.
Therefore, based on the balance between the role and cost of content production, Hatsune Miku has chosen "music", "MV", "dance", "concert", etc. as the main content carrying formats.
For example, Kumamon has chosen “emoticons”, “short videos”, “variety shows” and “advertising” as the main content carrying formats. (Similarly, Line’s Brown Bear started with emoticons)
Another example is Kizuna Ai, who I have fallen into recently. Kizunai's approach is to use motion capture and expression capture to make a three-dimensional video, and then artificially dub the video later. The main video content of Kizunai is "talk show", which can be regarded as a kind of "variety show". The production of core content mainly relies on PGC, and derivative content relies on PUGC and UGC. For example, some videos of Kizunai dancing are produced by enthusiasts with professional skills. Some Kizunai emoticons can be directly produced as UGC by users by taking screenshots and adding captions.
Now we have understood a virtual idol production path:
Give users a virtual idol personality setting, and then drive PUGC and UGC through a small amount of PGC content demonstration A large amount of content, and then create a virtual idol out of thin air.
So besides this path, are there other production paths for virtual idols?
In fact, because the cycle of producing virtual idols using the first path is very long, and the income provided in the process is quite limited, the risks of this path are high in China, where the virtual idol market is still very immature. It will be very big and very difficult (for example, Luo Tianyi has been doing it for more than 5 years, and the number of core fans is still quite small...). Producing content and cultivating the market require continuous investment and consume a lot of capital. Therefore, the second path may not be used as a reference:
Strip virtual characters from PGC content produced by film, television (animation) and games, and then have a complete personality setting (and character setting) around this Overlap) virtual characters that already have a certain degree of popularity, and create a large number of fan PUGC and UGC derivative content. This completes the process of separating the virtual character from the work itself. Eventually a virtual idol was derived.
The benefits of this approach are very obvious. First of all, the level of publicity and exposure of PGC content itself is often huge. Therefore, the cognitive foundation of this virtual idol among the people is much better than starting from scratch. Much higher. In addition, especially if it is a virtual character derived from movies, TV shows and games, the movies, TV shows and games themselves often make a lot of money, so the cold start cost of initiating derivative content can often be well covered.
Of course, there are also some challenges in creating a virtual idol. For example, to form an independent virtual idol, you need to first separate the virtual idol from the characters in the PGC content, and this separation process is actually relatively difficult. Because a lot of personalized content needs to be made, and this content needs to be clearly separated from the content of the PGC itself. In other words, virtual idols need to step out of their roles and form an independent personality. (This is why it is often difficult for us to regard Pikachu as an independent virtual idol, because he has not been well separated from the character.)
This process will use many techniques and methods, such as Create a social account for an avatar, allowing users to have social connections with the avatar; or create PGC/PUGC content with an independent background (or even cut the worldview, sometimes sending the avatar into the worldview of other stories). Gradually separate the worldview of the characters from their own content (in human terms, let Guan Gong fight Qin Qiong, or King Pesticide sends characters from various eras to a new worldview).
Of course, the character setting of some content itself is highly personalized, and the users themselves interact with the characters very socially; or the world view setting of some content itself is not very unique, and the world view is relatively light or relatively light. Tolerance; it will be much easier to separate roles in these two situations.
According to the second path, there is actually a very famous successful case, which is Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse's own story has basically not been updated for N years. But this virtual image is portrayed as very personified, and Disney often lets Mickey Mouse hang out everywhere, so Mickey Mouse is closer to the position of a virtual idol.
Therefore, if we follow the second path and look at the domestic virtual idol market, you will easily find that there are actually several things that on the surface have little to do with virtual idols, and you need to get involved. The probability of virtual idol success is actually not very small.
I would like to mention two things here, one is Miracle Nuannuan (Nuannuan dress-up game), and the other is the Time Traveler who appeared in the new reading chapter.
The game Miracle Nuannuan is very special because it is a dress-up game, so the core gameplay of the game is very light and the game feel is not that strong. During most of the game, in addition to matching clothes, players spend most of their time interacting with linear plots similar to text adventure games, and the main interaction object is the game character Nuan Nuan. So it's easy to personify the character.
On the other hand, the world view setting of this game is also relatively light. If you peel off the character Nuan Nuan, it will not be particularly difficult.
The most important point is that Miracle Nuannuan is a work with excellent income and profit, and its user coverage is also very wide (ask a girl around 14 years old...). So if Nuan Nuan’s production company invests enough capital to create fan PUGC/UGC content around Nuan Nuan, these contents will be based on “music”, “dance”, “MV”, “emoticons”, “variety shows”, “ "Advertisement" and so on, these are mainly words expressed in concrete variety shows. The possibility of turning Nuannuan into a virtual idol is quite high.
Of course, in fact, many popular mobile games have this possibility, such as Honkai Impact 3 or Onmyoji, or even King of Pesticide, but relatively speaking, you will encounter some differences when doing character stripping. difficulties.
Another mentioned time traveler, I previously put them in the field of new reading. However, they attach great importance to community operations, and when doing so, they "used" a lot of male characters from movies, TV shows, and games. They separated these characters and made derivative content of PGC, and guided users to socialize with these virtual characters in the community. . This process is essentially an effort to personify the character and then separate it from the original story.
This attempt at this method is very interesting, so it is worth paying attention to. However, Time Travel also has quite a few challenges. For example, there is no IP blessing associated with the original character, and it does not have capital support from the original IP party. It will be more difficult to solve this problem.
Of course, the fact that I mentioned these two projects here does not mean how successful these two methods can really be. I just hope that everyone can look at the creation path of domestic virtual idols from more new perspectives. Because the most critical thing in creating a virtual idol is not the imitation of a certain path, but the efficient production of a large amount of content around a personified virtual image that carries and displays the charm of this personified avatar.
You see, even in Hatsune’s hometown, talk show virtual idols like Kizunai have become popular.