The Early Spring

The main content is currently airing! | Every day at 12:00 noon, it is exclusively broadcast on Youku across the entire network.

The highly-anticipated urban healing drama The Early Spring premiered on August 26 as an exclusive global release on Youku. Right after its premiere, the series broke a popularity index of 5000. Its momentum kept surging and eventually surpassed 9000, securing top spots across multiple platform charts. Standing out amid fierce summer-season competition, it has emerged as a dark-horse realistic production winning both audience acclaim and massive viewership.

Adapted from the eponymous novel Don’t Cry, Girl from Jinjiang Literature City and scripted by Gao Xiaoxian, The Early Spring is headlined by Jing Boran and Sun Qian. Breaking away from cliché sweet-romance tropes, it avoids over-dramatized romantic entanglements and centers on ordinary individuals’ self-awakening amid the tides of urban life. Rejecting formulaic modern-romance narratives, it anchors its core theme: healing amid ups and downs, breaking through adversities. Delivered with authentic, gentle yet powerful textures of real-life experiences, the show strikes deep emotional chords with countless viewers.

Scenes shift from a shared-rental apartment in ordinary Beijing neighborhoods to the glossy high-rise advertising offices in the CBD. Outside the rental-apartment windows lies the bustling neighbourhood vibe of evening hours, with warm yellow lights flickering across windows of opposite buildings as night falls. Outside the office floor-to-ceiling windows, the spire of China World Trade Center Phase-3 pierces the skyline by daylight, while the endless red streams of vehicle traffic light up the Eastern Third Ring Road after dark.

All these constantly shifting background views for storytelling are rendered within a limited physical volume. Real-world urban landscapes are brought to serve narrative demands at any time via LED virtual-production technology.

The tenacious spirit portrayed in the show — of “striving for a bright future even while navigating life alone in a big city” — mirrors the craftsmanship of the EXCO VISION team. Just as Shang Zhitao holds fast to her inner optimism amid life’s vicissitudes, our team preserves visual authenticity by pushing the boundaries of what virtual production can achieve.

The power of a compelling story lies in emotions captured within every frame; and it is the precision-engineered technology that makes those emotions visible. Drawing on our end-to-end in-house R&D capabilities for visual imaging, we break down technical barriers so that every emotional nuance in the story can be accurately perceived.

Such dedication has earned genuine feedback from audiences. Besides sustaining top-ranking popularity on its domestic streaming platform, the drama has also launched globally on Netflix, conveying the aesthetic of Chinese-style urban healing to worldwide viewers.

Catch this Youku-exclusive title. Embark on a journey of self-healing and personal growth amid tender light and shadow where reality intertwines with virtual worlds.