- AIPopDB score
- 2/100
- Format
- Series
- Year
- 2024
- Views
- 180
Synopsis
In a near future, an alien civilisation's invasion causes the ancient ruins of Earth to mutate one after another, and Sanxingdui is the only site left untouched. Three groups of characters from rival factions enter a digitally generated ancient Shu kingdom, and a fierce struggle begins there.
The episodes' own captions name the players: the archaeologist Jiang Cheng, who sets out to find the tomb of the vertically-eyed people; the half-machine soldier Wu Xingyan; the rival Isabella; the astronaut Xiling; and an organisation called Stasa. Along the way a quantum computer on the Pacific seabed reconstructs the ancient Shu kingdom digitally, a giant silkworm appears and the bronze sacred tree links heaven and earth, a young ancient Shu king is sacrificed, and Jiang Cheng's soul collides with the king's to drive back a great flood.
The first season ends with the line that the cycle of civilisation has begun again and a bronze age of splendour is about to return. The tone is science fiction with mystery, built on Sanxingdui's real bronze figures, masks and sacred tree.
Last Updated 3 November 2026
About the Show
Sanxingdui: Future Revelation is a 13-episode AI-generated science-fiction short drama series of about 3 to 4 minutes an episode, over 50 minutes in all. Press describes it as the first Chinese AIGC-generated serial narrative drama. It premiered on Douyin on 8 July 2024, at a pace of one episode a day, and was also shown at the Beijing Grand Canal Museum's Sanxingdui and Jinsha exhibition.
Bona Film Group's AIGMS production centre made it with Douyin as co-producer and Douyin's Jimeng AI as chief technical support. It grew out of a feature film of the same name registered with the Sichuan film bureau in 2022 and was announced as a key national micro-drama in 2024. Qu Ji Xiaojiang (曲吉小江), Bona's production director and head of AIGMS, said the project was begun in 2022 but was slow because of its long production time and heavy cost, until AI tools arrived in 2023. The team refused to shoot real actors, insisting on AI generation.
AI video was used in script writing, storyboard design and image-to-video conversion. Bona's team said people still had to intervene repeatedly to keep expressions and scenes consistent, and the writing, editing and voice work still needed people. The team consulted literature, visited the Sanxingdui site and invited historians and science-fiction writers as advisers.
People's Daily Overseas Edition reported more than 140 million views across platforms by early August 2024, 135 million of them on Douyin, placing it in Douyin's top five short-drama charts. Yicai noted flaws such as lip-sync that did not match speech, stiff movement and rigid faces, and a viewer quoted by Tech Media (钛媒体) found the plot of this complex story less coherent and more like a string of fragmented scenes. A feature film, Sanxingdui: Future Past, is a separate work due in cinemas on 23 October 2026.
On YouTube the episodes are available as re-uploads by a small creator channel, Haode Keyframes (浩的关键帧), in Chinese, with the original Douyin captions.
Image: ytimg.com
Image: ytimg.com
Fun Facts
- Origin
- The drama is based on a feature film of the same name registered with the Sichuan film bureau in 2022.
- Source: yicai.com
- Human work
- Bona's team says scripts, editing and voice acting still needed people, and that AI output needed repeated manual correction.
- Source: paper.people.com.cn
- Reach
- People's Daily Overseas Edition reported over 140 million views across platforms, 135 million of them on Douyin, by early August 2024.
- Source: paper.people.com.cn
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Credits
- Studio
- Bona Film Group (博纳影业)
- Generated with
- Dreamina