Lark Takes on Short Drama Production

"Broke Foreigners"

The biggest non-original realization lately: no matter how niche or artsy you are, can you really resist short dramas?

Right? Wang Shuo scrolls short videos, Tang Wei rocks a Nezha phone case, and Jia Zhangke is happily binging on Hongguo. It's the darkest hour for artsy hipsters; the era of the masses just living their lives has arrived.

Honestly, I'm all for it. Two hands, two feet — I fully support the tittytainment economy ✌️

And it's not just China. Foreigners aren't hitting IMAX theaters for The Odyssey every day either: TikTok recently dropped numbers showing that in June alone, short drama revenue sharing on their platform hit $22 million — roughly the box office of five Niu Lai films 🥹

Hilarious. Turns out ordinary folks worldwide are the same, all figuring out how to spike their dopamine. So the mass line still wins. AI builders should focus on pure entertainment like web novels, games, and fiction. Make consumers happy, and they'll happily cough up the gold.

Naturally, I want to extract foreign gold too, so I'm thinking of shooting a few short drama episodes to test the waters.

Right on cue, I noticed that Skylark (Xiao Yunque) has started promoting short drama production — especially overseas short drama production — as a core feature. Be like:

And their premium/super membership is 40% off annual plans, so I figured I'd give it a spin. Here's the review ⬇️

01

Helping Director Jia Shoot a Short Drama Version of Ash Is Purest White

First, let's see how it handles domestic short dramas.

Since director Jia Zhangke is reportedly moved by short dramas daily, I decided to help him adapt Ash Is Purest White into a short drama using Skylark.

For those who haven't seen it: the film is roughly about Zhao Tao taking the fall for Liao Fan on an illegal firearms charge, getting out of prison to find he never waited for her, and eventually the two settling into a makeshift life together after his underworld career flames out.

I used Skylark's "Script Creation" feature, uploaded no materials, and simply typed "I want to turn Ash Is Purest White into a short drama" in the window.

I braced for massive typing. Fortunately, Skylark has trained a script model called ScriptBird that automates the whole process. I just clicked options to advance the production flow — no line-by-line script translation needed.

And the script model is refreshingly direct, reducing all profound, complex plots to web novel tropes: male-oriented, female-oriented, strong female lead, tortured romance, comeback arcs, big payoffs...

But for short drama creation, directness is a feature, not a bug 🤭

From outline to script

Once the script is locked, you enter asset production: Skylark automatically extracts required digital assets from the script — characters, scenes, etc. — and batch-produces them.

If the auto-generated assets don't work, you can modify them individually.

But here's the flaw: modifying assets requires hand-typing prompts in the canvas, with no Agent assistance. It feels like having your blind person's cane kicked out from under you.

Supposedly an Agent update is coming in September

Once all assets are adjusted, you enter video generation.

By this point, there's actually less to worry about — characters, scenes, and script are prepped, like mise en place ready for the wok.

If you're anxious, you can use the "Smart Previz" feature to generate keyframes for each shot, adjusting prompts if anything looks off.

The flaw remains: no Agent, hand-written prompts required.

Normally fine, but Seedance often fails generation due to faces, sensitivity issues, etc. Without an Agent to help rewrite prompts, it's pure panic — flailing, clueless, eventually just deleting the shot.

A bit user-hostile, shall we say 🙂↔️

Anyway, after deleting two or three shots and some manual editing, I present my short drama tribute to Director Jia: Ash Is Purest White ⬇️

I think the results are pretty explosive. Character consistency, motion coherence, narrative logic — all solid.

Mainly, as I've said before, Seedance 2.5's capabilities overflow for short dramas. Skylark, making the most of its own model, does push that capability to the limit.

The downside is obvious: it's expensive.

02

If Americans Shot a Short Drama Ash Is Purest White

Though that video is already polished, simply translating it to English and dumping it on TikTok probably wouldn't land with foreigners.

Right? Lines like "Four Horse Road" and "old yellow calendar" aren't in their vocabulary. County town streetscapes don't give them immersion. The leads' faces might not register as sexually charged to them.

Short dramas can go overseas, but pure translation won't cut it — localization is mandatory.

The data backs this: of that $16 million in TikTok short drama sharing mentioned earlier, only $6 million was translated dramas; the remaining $16 million was locally produced.

Foreigners worship foreignness too, understandable 😁

So does Skylark's overseas short drama feature do pure translation, or actual localized reconstruction? I decided to test with an American Ash Is Purest White.

The result ⬇️

Pretty funny. The American Ash Is Purest White doesn't happen in Datong, but in a Rust Belt Midwest slum, needles and beer shards everywhere, gang tats covering every thug, and the heroine downing a Starbucks in prison.

Genuinely localized — I've seen this episode in Shameless and Breaking Bad.

But there's a fatal problem: illegal firearm possession isn't a big deal in America? American shows open with gunfights and drug trafficking felonies. This adaptation falls flat.

I'd suggest rewriting it so the heroine admits she's an undocumented Mexican immigrant and gets deported. That tracks better 🤣

03

"I Sold My House Because You Complained About My Son's Noise and the Whole Building Lost It"

Skylark also has a very idiot-proof feature: one-click redrawing.

This time you don't even write a script or state requirements — just upload an existing short drama and directly replicate it.

But replication aside, can it actually localize?

I found a short drama I've been seeing a lot on Douyin lately: "I Sold My House Because You Complained About My Son's Noise and the Whole Building Lost It." It's about a single mother whose neighbors complain about her kid's noise, so she sells her place to an alpha male drum teacher and the whole building collapses.

I directly uploaded episode one and had Skylark do one-click redrawing to see the results.

Oh right — since Seedance 2.5 has strong multilingual capabilities, I tested both Japan and UK versions.

Japan version ⬇️

UK version ⬇️

My Japanese and English are both mediocre, so I don't know exactly what they're saying. But at least it sounds natural, accents authentic.

Character appearances and clothing are swapped for local aesthetics. Movements and posture seem adjusted by country too.

Overall plot and shot composition are basically millisecond-perfect 1:1 replication. They also launched a "white model reference" feature that converts the original video to a white model first, then generates new video via director controls.

Be like ⬇️

But I actually think pixel-perfect replication misses the point. Because localization necessarily means plot changes.

Take "I Sold My House..." — every country differs in housing architecture, urban landscapes, neighborhood relations, single-parent family dynamics. Pixel-perfect replication risks "New York City People's Hospital" level gaffes.

I'd suggest Skylark open this up more. Sometimes creative freedom produces better results.

04

Foreign Cows Can Fly

All the above tested live-action. Finally, a quick manga drama test.

During production I accidentally discovered that Niu Lai actually has a skylark character.

Shouldn't Skylark shoot a Yunque Lai to ride that wave hard?

I digress. Again using Skylark's "Script Creation" feature, I requested Niu Lai adapted into animation suitable for American audiences.

Result ⬇️

Actually quite good, even slightly Pixar-esque in texture.

But maybe I'm a boar who can't handle fine grain — right now I only want crude 3D建模 animation, not this fur-defined, light-and-shadow-effortless stuff 😭

But speaking of Niu Lai, not to force the comparison, I do think Skylark is having its own Niu Lai moment.

Skylark went through a positioning-confused wandering phase. Friends often asked me: why is ByteDance making so many AI video apps? What does Skylark even do? I was confused too — every time I heard about this app, it seemed to have different functions.

Now opening their website: one creative Agent, one short drama Agent, one marketing Agent. Clean, honest. Regardless of quality, at least you know what the team's purpose is.

For AI video products, big-and-beautiful is impossible. Or rather, pursuing big-and-beautiful ends as an infinite blank canvas, offering users zero guidance or direction. Specialized-and-excellent is what greatness looks like.

And whether from Seedance's model capabilities or short drama market development, Skylark is well-suited to make short dramas its specialization.

One more thing: I've previously said using Seedance 2.5 for short dramas is wasteful, because the masses are accustomed to cheap garbage.

But this time we're discussing going overseas. Nearly 200 countries and regions on Earth — plenty of short drama markets remain unestablished, consumer habits uncultivated. If Seedance 2.5 can ride Skylark's wave to capture some cultural high ground, defining the quality baseline for AI short dramas — that wouldn't be a bad thing.

Like Niu Lai — once it arrived, everything was measured against it 🥵

So here's to Skylark's Niu Lai 👊

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, purely human-written)

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