On April 2, the second season of the business observation documentary "Turbulence" was launched. With the core of "observing people in the torrent through a business perspective", it truly records the struggles and choices of ordinary people and entrepreneurs in the current state of Chinese business through five current hot business topics: "going overseas to build factories, cross-border e-commerce, tea beverage franchising, new energy vehicle companies, and hard technology development". Continuing the way of the first season's conversation between business reporter Li Xiang and the interviewees, it also goes into the real situation of entrepreneurs' struggles, showing the microcosm of life under the economic wave.
Season 2 poster of Riptide
In the official trailer, we can get a glimpse of the excitement caused by the shrinking "dividend of the times" - the company "Mi Xue Bing Cheng" which was recently listed on the Hong Kong stock market is training its ordinary employees to prepare for new stores, the car company "Ji Yue" announced a "collapse" the month after announcing a new sales record, and what kind of hustle and bustle and challenges are behind the craze for opening factories in Mexico... Compared with the sigh of "business is cruel" expressed by business reporter Li Xiang in the documentary, countless industries closely related to people's livelihood are alternating between rise and collapse, rewriting China's business history and the fate of the parties involved.
Recently, the documentary held an offline screening, where the creative team exchanged views with the media on the content of the program and shared their thoughts on the question of "how entrepreneurs and ordinary people should navigate the rapids of the times."
Hou Zhenhai, head of Tencent Video's Eureka Studio, said at the meeting: "In an era of commercial prosperity, we seem to be very lively, but as ordinary people, we still don't understand what's going on behind the scenes. 'Torrents' is to open up a black box that seems familiar but is actually unfamiliar to everyone in our era. We focus on the business events behind them, how everyone survives and makes choices, and how they face ups and downs and reflect."
Focus on ordinary people in the turbulent
The first episode of the second season of "Turbulence" is titled "Breaking Through Mexico", and it goes to Mexico, the birthplace of magical realism. Due to the high tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese goods, Chinese companies are forced to seek ways to circumvent trade barriers. The tariffs on many products exported from Mexico to North America can be reduced or even eliminated. For example, if more than 75% of auto parts are produced in North America, they can enter the US market tax-free. As a result, building factories in Mexico has become a trend for a while.
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
"Breaking Through Mexico" focuses on Su Xiuyong, a Chinese company representative who has been working at the Mexican border for a long time and general manager of Jilian Construction in Mexico. From his perspective, the program shows the process of Chinese companies building factories in Mexico and the challenges they face. The program also explores in depth the business choices faced by Chinese companies in the Mexican market, including how to deal with difficult problems such as engineering project management, cultural differences, and public security issues in Mexico.
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
Although "Breaking Through Mexico" spends a lot of space showing the Chinese factories under construction in Mexico, the main plot is always Su Xiuyong. From the program crew meeting him, to his several "dropping out" and running around to other cities to meet various clients, to the fact that when following him, one can only focus on his busy back, Su Xiuyong's first impression on the audience is one of busyness.
The camera does not tell much about how Su Xiuyong negotiates with various difficult clients and how he resolves various problems in a short period of time. This kind of running around and unsolvable problems, not knowing whether there is a definite answer until the last moment, and whether various problems will still arise, may be the norm for these entrepreneurs who are struggling in a foreign land.
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
Wu Xuejing, the chief director of the second season of Torrent, said that business itself has a lot of internal logic, and its narrative style and value system are very different from the humanities documentaries that the studio had previously made. "To be honest, we may not have the ambition to analyze the business level very thoroughly in a 40-minute film. What we can do is to objectively present the objective content we captured during the follow-up filming, and ultimately focus on the protagonist - what kind of person is he, why would such a person make these decisions in this incident, why he led the company to waver at several checkpoints and usher in an unexpected or perhaps expected ending. What we present is something relatively more emotional, different from more rational and abstract business reports."
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
To write an elegy for losers
In the trailer for the second season of "Torrent", we can see such a control group - on one side is the scene of Mixue Bingcheng training where everyone is wearing uniform clothes and receiving training like a tsunami, and on the other side is the empty office of Jiyue Automobile.
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
Liu Dongxiao, the producer of the second season of "Turbulence", said that there was a very general idea when planning the topic selection, "that is, in the five episodes of this season, we want to tell a story about failure in at least one episode. When chatting with an entrepreneur in the early stage, he said that although there have been stories of continuous failure in the past 40 years, the economy as a whole has been moving upward. But from the current situation, we have to admit that we are feeling more and more pressure. In this context, telling a story about failure and talking about people in trouble is what we are interested in."
Liu Dongxiao also shared the connection between the program narrative and social emotions: "The value of the topic selection lies in filming people in the rapids, because it is related to the current social emotions and the real world." He believes that when producing the second season, it is necessary to abandon the "success" narrative of traditional commercial programs and turn to recording the more realistic "revelation of reality". Those who pursue the dividends of the times are being tested by the changing wind direction, and ordinary people will also bear huge pressure when crossing the rapids. How to adjust the mentality to cope with the great test of the times, the second season of "Ripple" attempts to find answers for the audience through the lens.
Screenshot from Season 2 of Riptide
Wu Xuejing said that unlike previous humanities themes, changes in commercial themes are too drastic. "The issue of money causes things to change very suddenly, whether it is the speed of change or the pressure on people. The two protagonists in this episode about new energy vehicles, their stories were turned upside down in just 5 or 10 days." This also echoes the theme of "torrent".
"We focus not only on business logic, but also on people in the rapids. Even though it is difficult to find standard answers to challenges in a 40-minute program, the second season of "The Rapids" also attempts to provide ordinary audiences with more diverse thinking perspectives and methodologies," said Wu Xuejing.