Chinese AI short film "Helong" won the Best Story Award at the Astana Artificial Intelligence Film Festival

China News Service, Astana, October 6 (Reporter Shan Lu) "An AI short film with a traditional Chinese cultural background can win awards at overseas film festivals, which shows that this work has the power to transcend cultural differences. This is a great encouragement for our team."

At the first Astana Artificial Intelligence Film Festival, 2xLabs, a creative team from China, won the Best Story Award in the Open Competition for its artificial intelligence short film "The Last Span". Wang Yuchen, the executive director of the short film, recently accepted an exclusive interview with China News Service and talked about the considerations in subject selection, image production and story expression of this work.

This 17-minute short film was inspired by the experience of "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains" after it was burned and divided into two volumes, stored in two places, and later combined for exhibition. The film tells the story of a young girl, Ayu, who crossed the river to find her mother, and people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait worked together to build a bridge, and finally the bridge "joined the dragon".

"We have a very profound historical and cultural accumulation, and there is a lot to talk about." When it comes to the choice of creative themes, Wang Yuchen believes that with the current AI technology constantly updated, dazzling images can be easily copied, and the creator's own thinking and unique cultural expression can give the work distinctive features.

With the theme and concept in mind, the next step is to polish the quality of the work. Wang Yuchen said that "Helong" was completed by a team of more than ten people, covering screenwriter, director, art, artificial intelligence visual generation and editing, post-production and other aspects. It took about one and a half months and the computing power cost was less than 100,000 yuan. Among them, it only took more than a week to officially generate the video, and more time was spent polishing the script, determining the visual style, and closely integrating the picture with the story.

"We give the pictures and sounds of the determined style to the model, and then use prompt words to describe the scenery, character movements, and speaking voices, etc., to 'run out' the imagined picture." Wang Yuchen said that when the generated effect is not ideal, it is necessary to re-examine the understanding of the scene and adjust the prompt words to allow the model to accurately present the creative intention.

Artificial intelligence gives more ordinary people the opportunity to turn ideas into images, but lowering the technical threshold does not mean that creation becomes easy. Wang Yuchen believes that the creator's aesthetics, narrative ability, values, and understanding of people and the world have increasingly become the key to creating distance between works.

After the award-winning works of the film festival were announced, Kazakhstani media commented that "Helong" left a deep impression on the audience with its unique art style and exquisite narrative structure.

Talking about the reviews of his works overseas, Wang Yuchen believes that although creators from all over the world have different cultural backgrounds, they have a common film language. "Using this language well and making high-quality films is the prerequisite for achieving cross-cultural understanding."

"I went to see "Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant" not long ago and was very inspired. When the work meets the standard in terms of expression and quality, and allows the audience to enjoy watching it, and people are willing to watch it on the platform or in the theater, the values in the story have the possibility to transcend cultural differences," Wang Yuchen said. (over)