With the improvement of short video production technology, presenting narrative content in a few minutes-long works has increasingly become the pursuit of short video creators. If short video is regarded as a new text and narratology research object of fusion media, it can be found that the narrative form, narrative time, and temporal and spatial characteristics of narrative flow of short video have their own distinctive characteristics.

Short videos present a strong hybrid narrative feature. As far as narrative space is concerned, short videos focusing on family life are mostly based on three meals a day and warm interaction with family members. Waiting for performing arts to be integrated into family members’ conversations, taking a funny route; VLOGs of daily life record streams, mostly switching to different time and space scenes such as commuting to work, shopping parties, fitness and leisure, etc. to switch and collage the imagination of prosperous urban life; traditional cultural themes, Most of them win with ancient style and artistic conception, put appropriate characters in the corresponding landscaping and carry out related labor behaviors. In short, whether it is the rhythm of the beginning and the end, the contrast between the front and the back, the foreshadowing and flipping, or the close-up of the “highlight moment” of people and objects, the short video accommodates a variety of narrative art with great creative freedom and flexible space. The characteristics of the combination of culture, folk culture and popular culture.

With the improvement of short video production technology, presenting narrative content in a few minutes-long works has increasingly become the pursuit of short video creators. If short video is regarded as a new text and narratology research object of fusion media, it can be found that the narrative form, narrative time, and temporal and spatial characteristics of narrative flow of short video have their own distinctive characteristics.

In terms of narrative time, although many themes are devoted to deliberately imitating the natural time sequence (such as the growth of animals and plants, the spring planting, autumn harvesting and winter storage of agricultural civilization, etc.), the short video mainly rewrites the speed and slow performance of natural time, and its time rhetoric mainly includes: Two: Press the “accelerate” key, which imitates “slow” time. The former, such as reading movies and TV shows in three minutes, experiencing the beauty of a city in tens of seconds, and visiting famous mountains and rivers in tens of seconds, compressing and synthesizing the time of the scene changes over a long period of time with the technology of delayed photography, fully excavating And occupying the remaining fragmented time of people is the symbol of “occupying and depriving human beings of the last breathing space” in the era of attention economy. The latter, in addition to the not-so-new daily life narrative of slow time and slow life, is also about magnifying and decelerating details: the soft and shiny fur of a cheetah running becomes visible frame by frame, and the beautiful six sides of snowflakes fall. The shape is slowly frozen, or the sight is fixed on the “autumn in the old capital”, “the snow in the northern part of Saibei”, and so on, so that people can gain slow and quiet spiritual power from the deceleration of time.

The rhetoric about time and space in the short video is an image construction of the real society, which reflects the emotional configuration of modern people. Compared with the hysteresis of literature and art representing the emotions of the times, short videos can be called “instantaneous” art. It preserves countless “moments” closely related to ordinary people’s lives in a visual way, both as a way of socializing and as an emotional outlet. However, when modern people are in the anxiety of the “acceleration era”, they are afraid to take a step behind them, and they can grab short-term knowledge, skills and experience from short videos and quickly put them into practice in the workplace, family and life. The pursuit of efficiency has given birth to the desire for short videos to pursue “fastness” in their “shortness”. After all, the human mind is not a machine. For the alienated rebound, let it pursue a rhythm that conforms to the natural circadian rhythm, and “slow” becomes the real need of the mind. The time and space rhetoric of short videos are subject to human’s understanding of speed and the need for individualization of life.

In recent years, with the rise of new media sociology, new media represented by short videos are regarded as field investigations and ethnographic texts with the color of media landscape. In this sense, short videos construct and represent a clearer and more concrete “imagined community”, which is nothing less than an ethnographic expression in the digital age. In this field, although users have the freedom to express their personal emotions—they can laugh and scold in their own video works—there is no doubt that individual emotions receive collective emotional calls from countries, nations, ethnic groups, and regions.

The ardent and deep feelings of family and country, the self-confidence and tolerance of national feelings, the heroism of sacrificing one’s life, etc. are once again magnified and highlighted in the short video, like a huge magnetic field, attracting ordinary people to express the emotions of individual freedom subtly and merge into the collective. the sound of. Whether it is from the archaeological excavation of Sanxingdui, showing the long history of civilization of the diverse and integrated Chinese nation, or the ordinary fire hero who saves lives despite the danger, the short video highlights the characters with narrative time and space rhetoric, accumulating strong and fiery emotions strength. For example, in May last year, a 15-second short video on the “CCTV News” account sending off Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice, received 35 million likes and nearly 4.5 million comments. This brings together the gratitude of tens of millions of ordinary people to the “father of hybrid rice”, the mourning for the death of Yuan Longping, and more deeply the love and tribute to the scientists, role models of the times, heroes and other figures represented by Yuan Longping. .

In the era of national video, short videos are not only the records of events, the exploration of daily life, but also the engraving and engraving of emotions. In the short video world, the trickle of individual emotions exists, and will eventually merge into the emotional river of the community, the collective, and the family, and condense into a close “emotional community” in the virtual space.