Director Xiao Ce, whose real name is Zhang Ce, is a short video creator. On the Internet, he is best known for two labels, one is the "Zhu once the boring life" master planner, screenwriter, director, the other is the "square past" series of microfilm director.
At the end of September, Zhang Xiaozhe released the final installment of the series, and netizens in the comments section exclaimed, "I can't let go of Auntie Goose, the Three Guns, and all the other aunts". So far, the series has been viewed by more than 68 million people on video sites.
These two IPs have given Zhang Xiaoze, who majored in veterinary medicine, self-confidence and fame, and have also witnessed the short-video director's inward search and upward ambition.
Zhang Xiaoze, a native of Zibo, Shandong Province, graduated from Shandong Agricultural University, majoring in veterinary medicine. By chance, he joined a video-making club and learned how to make a video, "and that's how he couldn't help liking making videos in an agricultural university."
Zhang Xiaoze almost went to sell feed after graduating from college in 2016, but ultimately couldn't let go of his love for video. "I chose to do this business as long as I couldn't starve."
In 2018, Zhang Xiaoze returned from Qingdao to his hometown of Zibo, where he was introduced by a neighbor to a local media company. A year later, the short video "Zhu once the boring life" series became a hit on the network screen, the IP is the hottest time, as a director and screenwriter Zhang Xiaoze had updated more than 30 videos in a month, "finally did the whole network 20 million fans.
But a long time to create the same type of face, the subject matter, can not satisfy Zhang Xiaoze's desire to create, he felt a little tired, lack of, after some agonizing he decided to leave, start their own business, "there is a dream to follow.
When he first started his own business, in order to keep his company alive, he took on all kinds of work, but the results were not very good. Until a chance, he came into contact with a group of moncler outlet store uk women in the village of Yinliu in Zibo City, and took them as the protagonists to make a film about children not being able to go home for the New Year in the Spring Festival. "I didn't care about this at the time, but I didn't expect it to explode when it was broadcast during the New Year."
Since then, Zhang Xiaoze began to fix the shooting scene in Yinliu Village, these original life has nearly retired from the rural elderly, in Zhang Xiaoze's lens to return to become the protagonist of the story.
Netizens who have been following Zhang's work have found that, compared with the previous IP, "Square Past" has a fuller and more complex group of characters, which started with a grandpa and grandma grabbing the square dance floor as the origin, and then gradually derived from the "Goose Universe," which is an overlapping of the absurd and the ordinary, as well as a mixture of the magical and the vernacular.
Zhang Xiaoze's videos are getting longer and longer, carrying more and more information. The emergence of "The Plaza's Past" has made a slight difference to the village of Yinliu in Zibo, Shandong Province, and the people who live there.
Zhang Xiaoze said that Aunt Goose and Three Guns (the cast of "Once Upon a Time in the Square") are still the same after the fire, and that when they are not filming, their lives are no different from those of ordinary rural elders. "They only occasionally lament how young people nowadays travel so far to get their pictures taken! Before that, some people took a six-hour bus ride to run inside the village to punch in and take pictures."
In January 2022, Zhang Xiaoze was honored as one of the "Top 100 UP Hosts of 2021" by BeiliBeili, and his series "Past Events in the Square" was awarded "Original Columns of 2021".
Zhang Xiaoze remembers that when he first graduated from college, he was too shy to say what he did whenever he was asked. "When people ask you what you do, you say I'm a director. Then people ask you what movies you've directed, and you can't tell them, can you?"
When asked if he belongs to the category of people who have been changed by the Internet, he barely hesitates: "Of course."
In the past, only those who came from the academy or within the film and television industry had the tools and the right to express themselves, but nowadays the booming development of short videos on the Internet has given every ordinary person a chance to realize his or her own "directing dream".
Zhang Xiaoze feels that the Internet has opened up the eyes of ordinary people, allowing them to see a bigger world, which gives them greater ideals and ambitions. "Thanks to the short videos that gave me the opportunity to be a director and allowed me to direct at such a low cost."