City's Transformation From Film Base to Visual Culture Tech Innovation Lab

The 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, which kicked off today, is setting a new benchmark for both industry scale and technological integration. The deployment of artificial intelligence and its integration with creativity is the most heated topic, both in terms of filmmakers adapting to the new technology and its industrial implementation.

In this regard, a new digital-intelligence-empowered full-chain industry ecosystem was launched at Shanghai High-tech Film and Television City in suburban Songjiang District. It is part of Shanghai's ongoing vision to build the infrastructure for the next generation of visual culture.

The ecosystem includes five new platforms: the Shanghai International Short-Drama Copyright Trading Center that will be the first to set up a mechanism to trade dividend rights of short-dramas; an AI interactive short-drama creation service platform providing help from AI-generated scripts, multimodal video generation, and distribution assistance; an AI MCN (multi channel network) empowerment platform; an AIGC (AI generated content) one-stop integrated creative platform; and an AIGC full-domain culture and tourism film empowerment platform.

The series of initiatives marks the acceleration of Shanghai's ongoing transformation from a traditional film base into a film and television technology innovation lab. The city is now actively constructing a digitalized film industrial production system to link creativity, technology and industrial layout to set the standard for global cinema reform.

"Technology is no longer just a tool, but a new language to tell the future," said producer and director Huang Jianxin.

"Only two years ago, we were just discussing and debating the idea of using AI, but it has developed faster than any of us could have predicted. What everyone thought would happen five years later now happens within a year. So we should just do it, and try to tackle the challenges in the process."

The biggest challenge of using AI is "to reduce of feeling of AI, and the biggest breakthrough is to turn AI from merely a tool to an ecosystem", according to Li Tingwei, deputy general manager of Bauhinia Films.