After the trailer received 600,000 views across platforms, Chen Kun's full short film "The Mirror of Mountains and Seas: Cleaving Waves" was finally released, quickly gaining over 10 million views on Kuaishou. This short drama tells a simple "hero fights the dragon" story: a young man rushes into the sea to battle the final boss and win in order to rescue his kidnapped mother.
Notably, from the script to storyboards, concept art to final video presentation, and even the soundtrack, everything was generated by AI tools. The short film's depiction of water and fire gods, turbulent waves, and various mythical creatures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas demonstrates Kaiber's leading position as an AI video generation model. Its generative capabilities have overcome the previously criticized "PowerPoint feel" and show consistency in characters across different scenes.
Chen Kun has over 20 years of experience directing and producing variety shows and large-scale galas. In the second half of 2023, he became interested in AI, realizing that AI-generated films had become possible. This may also stem from reflection on missing the short video wave. Currently, Chen Kun's company, Xingxian Culture, has completed financing, and he believes AI films have achieved commercialization in TVC and short drama fields.
In the production process, AI mainly participated in the "actual shooting" and post-production special effects stages of traditional filmmaking. Chen Kun used tools like Midjourney for text-to-image generation, and Kaiber and Pixverse for image-to-video conversion. He emphasizes that AI can only assist in creation and cannot completely replace original work.
Regarding the extent of AI replacing human labor, Chen Kun believes that current large language models are not true artificial intelligence, capable only of "creating from existing" rather than "creating from nothing." He stresses that AI will always be just a tool, and professionals remain irreplaceable.
Chen Kun points out that for AI to match traditional film effects, improvements are still needed in character consistency, scene consistency, character performance, and action interaction. He believes the AI era may produce many super individuals, allowing individuals to create decent film works.
Chen Kun is actively embracing the AI film revolution because he doesn't want to repeat the experience of missing the short video wave that disrupted long-form video. He believes that the changes AI brings to the film industry may be more thorough than the previous disruption, and hopes to be among the first beneficiaries when commercial opportunities explode.