'Shoestring crew' puts drama and passion back into videos

Fight against forgetting

The team's office holds many editions of Chinese-language textbooks. Some are yellowed and worn, and the pages are annotated with ideas and observations.

Zhang peruses the books every day and writes down ideas on a whiteboard. If the content overlaps with viewers' recommendations, the project is given priority.

The director admitted that when he first read the textbooks as a student he didn't fully understand their meaning. Now he studies the historical background behind almost every sentence.

"We just want to present things we could not understand in a very realistic way, so that students today easily understand what the text and story are about," he said.

Today, the Haojiahuo team has 10 members. They have turned more than 30 textbook lessons into video stories and sometimes take liberties with the content to get across the essence of a work. A textbook might only account for about 20 percent of a video.

"We want viewers to see what kind of life, choices, and era gave birth to those words," said Zhang.

When shooting A Letter to My Wife, he felt they should not just make it a love story.

The letter was written in 1911 by revolutionary martyr Lin Juemin to his wife, Chen Yiying. Behind the letter was a farewell in which he indicated he was willing to die to save the nation from peril.

So the team added an interrogation scene not in the textbook to express Lin's resolve. Viewers said the production helped them better understand Lin's sacrifice.

As of today, the video had more than 4.66 million likes on Douyin alone, making it one of Haojiahuo's most popular works.

After that, their short videos were played in more and more classrooms. Teachers keep sending photos and messages to the team, and some schools now use the videos as teaching tools.

The team also realized that few of their followers remembered the name Haojiahuo. Many viewers found them through typing in phrases such as "an account that remakes Chinese-language textbooks".

At the same time, production costs were rising and the team was uncertain about the financial viability of the venture. From December 2025 to early February 2026, the members discussed changing direction. During the hiatus, however, students, teachers and parents kept sending messages asking when the next video would come out.

In February, Haojiahuo resumed shooting.

Zhang said he had worked out viewers did not necessarily have to remember the video creator's name. "As long as they remember a textbook lesson, a character or a period of history, the work has value," he said.

The team's hope now is that their content inspires audiences and helps viewers remember and understand history.

Zhang wrote on their Douyin homepage that, "history is not a thin sheet of text" and "resisting forgetting" itself is the greatest value of their work.

Gao Wen, an associate professor of psychology at Liaoning Normal University, noted that from a psychological perspective, video content can help motivate children and adolescents to learn, while also triggering emotional experiences that make memories more profound.

"Text is abstract. A large body of research shows that extensive reading of texts helps children and adolescents develop cognitive abilities such as abstract thinking and imagination," she said.

Video-assisted learning, meanwhile, may also limit the development of abstract thinking and active imagination, she warned.