Author: David, Shenchao TechFlow
Hollywood is searching online for a Chinese person. However, the person being sought hasn't even left a usable contact method.
On the evening of May 10, PJ Ace, the founder of the Los Angeles AI film studio Genre.ai, shared a short AI film called "Zombie Cleaner" on X. PJ Ace is perhaps one of the most authoritative figures in the AI video circle, with his self-produced content receiving over 300 million views across all platforms.
He rated this short film very highly, saying, "It's one of the best short films I've seen in recent years."
The concept of the short film is roughly about a robot cowboy riding an ostrich through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, battling zombies and having a romance with a plastic model. Besides the themes being sufficiently cyber and magical, the visuals and music also possess the quality of a major film.
(Viewers who haven't seen it can click here to experience it.)
Just a few hours after PJ's post, the view count reached 5 million.
He then posted a message seeking the person: "I really want to hire the director of this film, but I can't find him. I think he is a Chinese creator on Douyin."
A person holding Hollywood content production resources is seeking a Chinese person on Twitter as if posting a lost and found notice? I think this scene itself is already more fantastical than the short film...
His reasoning is that something of this quality would have cost at least $500,000 and taken 6 months before the advent of AI, while this author achieved that level with just his own creation. Thus, the post below quickly turned into a search event, with some searching for the author ID MX-Shell and others flipping through clues on Bilibili.
A large-scale cross-server search from Hollywood to the Bilibili comment section started like this.
However, on the same day PJ Ace urgently posted the search notice on Twitter, the short film hadn't made any waves on Bilibili or Douyin and quietly sat within the information feed.
A short film made by a Chinese person using Chinese AI tools had to first make a splash across the Pacific before being seen by its own people. The process of this large-scale cross-server search returning home became an instance of exporting to domestic sales.
