Grassroots AI Crew Turns Song Dynasty Saga into a Short-drama Juggernaut

"I suddenly found that one sentence could generate an image, and another could turn that image into video. I was so excited," Zhang Hansheng told Hongxing News.

The 54-year-old freelance entrepreneur had stumbled through several businesses, gone home to care for his father, and filled quiet months with web novels he could never afford to film. In March 2025 he began teaching himself AI filmmaking, often for more than 10 hours a day.

About a year later, that wager produced one of China's most watched AI short dramas. According to Upstream News, Zhang's "Old Eleven Theater" team, named after his trainee number, made "Armed Into the Song," adapted from a web novel by Tomato Novel author Cha Gen'er. A modern five-person squad falls into the late Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) and fights to hold a frontier village as history races toward the Jingkang catastrophe.

The numbers are huge. Plays nationwide topped 4 billion by early October, and on the Hongguo platform the series has gathered about 11.41 million favorites. Producer-writer Li Chaohua said compute spending on the franchise alone exceeded 1 million yuan. Episodes run under two minutes, and since its mid-August debut the show has landed roughly a season a week, about 100 episodes each.

The makers are no industry veterans. The core crew of about 10 includes a mom who ducks meetings for school pickup, a former ride-hailing driver, a wholesaler, a small-truck courier and office staff, working online from Guangdong, Anhui, Hubei, Jiangxi and Fujian, with Zhang in Shijiazhuang. Li said at least one member came into the project in debt and has since paid it off.

Their edge is grind, not gadgets. Ordinary shots may take three generations; battle scenes often need 10 or more, sometimes past 20. They build character assets even for bit-part soldiers to stop the AI from swapping faces, and check Song official colors and accessories to get the feel of a proper costume drama. "My original intention was simple – make money with the team, and we did," Zhang said. "I'm just an ordinary guy."

The urge to retell history with AI is spreading beyond short dramas. Tech news site AI Rebao reported that creator 0xMomo posted a viral "surveillance tape" of Sima Guang, the boy in the classic tale who smashed a water vat to save a drowning friend, complete with fixed CCTV framing and timestamps. It is one of a wave of mock ancient security clips that have viewers laughing at, and relearning, old stories as if a Song courtyard somehow had cameras.

China released nearly 550,000 micro-dramas online in the first 10 months of 2026, almost 17 times the total for all of 2025, according to the National Radio and Television Administration. AI-generated productions accounted for more than 94% of this year's releases, highlighting the technology's rapid rise in the industry.