TimeLine
BookVA2026
A Message for the Butterfly
About this film
What if the things we remember were never meant to stay with us – but something we send ahead? Follow a journey of the mind in which bodies dissolve, dreams change shape, and fragments of the past travel toward beings of the future. What survives when the self does not? What is lost? And who receives the message after the sender is long gone? 🏆 Honor for Industrial Exploration at the Shanghai International Film Festival 2026 "A Message for the Butterfly" was created during the "AI Backlot" initiative of the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) 2026, designed to test how filmmaking itself changes when traditional cinema and AI-native creation meet inside the same process.
How It Was Made
Chinese director, screenwriter, and singer Hou Zuxin from Beijing paired up with Berlin-based writer and AI filmmaker Mark Wachholz as the cross-cultural team "Bicycle Kids," bringing together classical cinematic instinct, performance sensitivity and lived cultural memory with an experimental, AI-driven approach to image-making and speculative storytelling. Developed over four weeks with the support of Minimax Hailuo, the project became both a finished film and a live case study in co-creation: a poetic “documentary of ideas” shaped through conversation, memory, visual iteration, prompts, discarded images, aesthetic judgment, and the search for a new language between human intention and machine imagination. AI keyframes created with Midjourney V7 & V8.1 and GPT Image 2, AI video animation with Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0, AI voice by ElevenLabs V2, AI music created with Suno 5.5, made with the help of the Minimax Hailuo platform and the Minimax Hailuo Hub, AI sound effects from Seedance 2.0, grain and film look with Dehancer Pro.
- Midjourney V8.1
- GPT Image 2
- Seedance 2.0
- Kling 3.0
- ElevenLabs V2
- Suno 5.5
