Author: Yufeng Zhao

 
One Free Click is an interactive website that showcases trending yet replicable Kuaishou videos within selected hashtags and generates auto-edited derivative videos, ready to upload with a single click. This project is inspired by the structural practice of video reproduction on Kuaishou, the leading short video platform in China.
Kuaishou is known for the unabashed earthiness of its contents and its encouragement for mass entrepreneurship by means of monetization of digital content. On Kuaishou, in order to speed up the production and bring down the cost, there are a large group of videos that are reproductions of existing ones. Many reproduce the same plots, scenes or lines, and some are just collages or re-edits of existing videos. However, thanks to Kuaishou’s delicately curated recommendation system, the lack of content originality does not affect the publicity of the videos in attracting new audiences to the publishing accounts. Such workflows are often passed down from established Kuaishou influencers to newcomers through self-run mentorship programs.
One Free Click is a piece of web art as well as a product designed for newcomers to the Kuaishou business. The entry page presents a collection of videos under a few popular tags among the reproduction practice. Under each tag, a condensed view of the existing corpus is shown in order to quickly familiarize the user with its creative context. While unveiling the phenomenon, it also responds with an automated editing workflow for simple video reproduction, free of charge to average Kuaishou users struggling with mechanical labor and hassles in their mobile editing software. With a click of a button, it generates a random video from a database of existing ones for immediate downloading and publishing. It aims to provoke thoughts in China’s landscape of fast-entertainment, mass entrepreneurship, and the ecosystem for content creators.