Reality TV

A search for emotion

Tan Chongqing, a junior journalism student at Tsinghua University, was among the eight-person team tasked with finding the footage.

Tan, however, had an advantage over his colleagues－he is a Wuhan local.

In mid-January, when the winter vacation started, Tan went back home to the city. He has spent nearly three months with his parents and his sister. When he heard about the documentary, he signed up immediately.

"I haven't watched short videos on Kuaishou before, but I could use my local advantage to search for the videos of people nearby," Tan says.

There are tens of thousands of videos on Kuaishou, so Tan also used the names of local snacks and roads as keywords in his searches.

Between Feb 9 and 15, every day Tan and his teammates would each submit 30 clips they had chosen to the database of the documentary.

"We have two rules when selecting the materials－one is that it has to be documentary footage with no background music and filmed by the user, and the other is that it has to touch the viewers in some way," he says.

One clip that particularly moved him during his search was of a volunteer driver from Shaanxi province, who transferred goods to support Wuhan. "His case showed that every single person was helping Wuhan in their own way," Tan says.