AI-Assisted Short Film / 2026
02:08
THE INCH ABYSS
《方寸深渊》
Final cut
Project thesis / 01
CONCEPT BEFORE TOOLCan the vibrant imagination of childhood survive the rigid conformity of the adult world?
Synopsis / 02
A surreal coming-of-age film about imagination, social measurement and the possibility of reclaiming agency.
A young boy walks through an ordinary city, but in his mind, the world is a canvas for extraordinary adventures. Triggered by glowing toy marbles, he leaps over volcanic fissures in the sidewalk, traverses a suddenly transformed frozen wasteland of ice, turns real cars on the road into speeding toy racing cars, and battles a giant clockwork robot. These marbles manifest his boundless childhood imagination. However, a crucial turning point arrives when he is mesmerized by a sharp suit in a shop window. Drawn inside, he falls into a surreal void of giant golden measuring tapes, which wrap around him like constraints, binding him into the rigid mold of maturity. Time passes, and the boy grows into a disillusioned man trapped in a monotonous corporate existence, surrounded by identical, emotionless peers in a grey elevator. Just as he seems completely consumed by the bleak reality of adulthood, he stumbles upon a glowing green marble on a street. Picking it up, he is faced with a silent choice: will he crush the last remnant of his inner child, or let the magic transform his world once again?
Narrative architecture / 03
Imagination expands, discipline narrows.
Control becomes a larger machine
The sphere rewrites traffic and summons a clockwork giant, placing the boy beneath the scale of time and industrial order.
The body is measured and recut
The tailoring chamber converts growth into measurement; the adult returns to the city and encounters a green sphere that reopens the cycle.
Selected frames / 04
Every image must carry evidence.
Childhood Vision and Boundless Imagination
Highlighting the fluid and surreal nature of a child's mind, seamlessly blending mundane reality with vibrant fantasy.
Social Measurement and Bodily Discipline
Translating the psychological violence of socialization into claustrophobic physical constraints and desaturated spaces.
Suppressed Subjectivity and Open Choice
Depicting the grim reality of adulthood through uniform compositions and cold lighting, signifying the erasure of individuality, and a quiet, visually striking resolution that leaves the protagonist poised between crushing reality and reignited imagination.
Visual system / 05
Circular forms preserve possibility; linear systems assign direction, scale and value.
Circular Possibility and Linear Measurement
The marble is defined by circular form, suspension and unpredictable movement, representing imagination and self-directed possibility. It is opposed by streets, clocks, suits and measuring tapes—linear systems that assign direction, scale and value. The conflict between circle and line becomes the film’s central visual grammar.
Elastic Scale and Subjective World-Building
Ordinary urban space repeatedly expands into volcanic fractures, frozen terrain, digital grids and monumental clockwork bodies. Unstable scale, shifting perspective and impossible spatial transitions allow the environment to respond directly to the child’s imagination, treating reality as a subjective and transformable field.
Visual Compression across the Character Arc
Childhood is expressed through open space, low-angle discovery, saturated elemental colour and unrestricted movement. As social discipline intensifies, the image contracts into black-and-gold confinement, frontal symmetry and desaturated adult interiors. The visual field becomes progressively narrower as individual agency is reduced.
Human–AI workflow / 06
AI expanded the possible worlds; recurring motifs, scale and montage kept them narratively controlled.
Mapping the Film through Recurring Objects
Before generating the surreal environments, I assigned four recurring objects distinct narrative functions: the marble as imagination, the clock as standardised time, the suit as adult identity and the measuring tape as social quantification.
Using Motion and Shape to Bridge Discontinuity
Because character faces and environments vary between generations, I anchored continuity in actions and forms rather than photorealistic sameness: the marble rolls and floats, the boy reaches and runs and movement repeatedly follows the street’s central axis. Shape echoes and match-on-action allow separate outputs to read as one subjective journey.
Creating the Life Transition through Montage
The film abruptly cuts at its climax, using a hard cut with identical framing to create a sense of interruption and tension, leaving the audience with a lingering emotional impact. AI generated the separate ages and spaces; montage established the causal movement from imagination to conformity and the possibility of reawakening.
Engineering proof / 07
Show the decisions behind the final frame.
Character Consistency
Besides character multi-view, FaceFusion 3.6 was applied to a specific video segment to preserve facial identity consistency, ensuring the character's facial features remained aligned with the established character design and improving visual continuity.
Sound Post-Production and Final Mix
The score was assembled from five stylistically related underscore tracks generated with Suno AI. These tracks were edited, layered and restructured into a continuous musical progression following the film’s movement from childhood imagination to adult conformity. Individual sound effects were generated with ElevenLabs AI and arranged in DaVinci Resolve to reinforce environmental transitions and dramatic emphasis. Valhalla VintageVerb and other reverb VSTs were used selectively to connect disparate audio elements, shape spatial depth and differentiate the film’s changing environments. iZotope RX 11 was applied at the final stage to refine the completed mix and adjust the overall stereo master.
Shot Development Archive
This production sheet documents the development of character studies, recurring objects, environmental mutations and first–last frame pairs across the film. Generated assets were organised around recurring visual anchors—including the protagonist, the marble, measuring tapes, the urban street axis and the clockwork world—before being selected for animation, compositing and editorial use. The archive also records partial-detail studies and rejected variants used to test character continuity, action direction, object scale and transition logic.
Director's statement / 08
The marble does not restore childhood; it restores the possibility of choosing.
I created this story to explore the tragic loss of childhood imagination as we integrate into the rigid structures of adulthood. The core creative question is whether the mundane reality of growing up permanently extinguishes our inner creative spark. AI was essential for this project because it effortlessly visualizes the fluid, boundless nature of a childs mind, seamlessly transitioning between a realistic city street and surreal, hyper-stylized dreamscapes like volcanic fissures, icy wastelands, or golden measuring tape voids. My most important directorial decision was the stark visual contrast: the boys world is highly saturated, dynamic, and chaotic, while the adult world is framed with cold, desaturated, and symmetrical claustrophobia. To control the AI rather than let it dictate the narrative, I meticulously engineered prompts focusing on specific textures, physics, and lighting. Instead of relying on random generation, I used the AI as a precision rendering tool to translate highly specific emotional states into environmental metaphors, ensuring the technology served the psychological journey of the protagonist.
Iteration & reflection / 09
The central challenge was not generating more worlds, but deciding which transformations carried meaning.
The film revealed both the creative potential and the central risk of AI world-building: visual abundance can weaken narrative hierarchy when every sequence attempts to become a spectacle. The most effective moments are those in which a single object—the marble, measuring tape or suit—carries both visual transformation and character meaning. In a future version, I would reduce the number of environmental mutations, give each world a clearer dramatic function and sound motif.
Methods / index