Experience under uncertainty: individual-level influence in the production of Chinese nature documentaries

Within contemporary Chinese media production, mainstream nature documentaries unfold through long production cycles and field-based uncertainty amid institutional expectations. Existing scholarship has often approached Chinese nature documentaries as finished texts or vehicles of public communication. Less attention has been paid to how production decisions take shape in mainstream practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with directors and key creative members from two cases, The Land of Spirits and Green Gannan, this study uses a qualitative multiple-case design to examine how filmmakers mobilise accumulated experience during production. The analysis shows that experience is not a stable background attribute but a practical resource that becomes consequential when routine coordination and procedural guidance offer limited support. In such situations, filmmakers draw on prior experience to interpret constraints, adjust priorities, and sustain production continuity under uncertainty. By conceptualising experience as a practice-based resource activated under uncertainty, this study specifies when individual-level influence becomes analytically visible within the Hierarchy of Influences model. The findings extend the model beyond news production by clarifying how experience mediates situated decision-making in non-news production characterised by long timelines, environmental unpredictability, and limited routinisation.

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