Description
Dingjun Mountain follows Zhou Jianguo, a veteran living with Alzheimer's. When a building catches fire one night and traps a little boy, Doudou, the familiar beats of Peking Opera awaken Zhou's deep-rooted military instincts. Seeing the burning building as an ancient battlefield, he rushes against the fleeing crowd and rescues the child. Once the danger has passed, his illness takes his memory away again, but his neighbors remember his courage.
The film blends traditional Peking Opera with the story of an ordinary hero: even when illness robs someone of their memory, their inner sense of duty endures. It is dedicated to the forgotten heroes living among ordinary people.
The Peking Opera soundtrack drives the narrative, and visual dissolves separate reality from the protagonist's hallucinations. As an AI live-action short, it balances realistic fire scenes with Chinese-style fantasy visuals, and an opening one-way tracking shot efficiently sets up the characters' backgrounds.
In pre-production, ChatGPT was used to polish the script and storyboards, and gpt-image-2 produced the art assets. The footage was generated with AI tools such as TapNow, and editing, voice-over and color grading were done in CapCut.
How Tripo was used
Tripo supplied the 3D assets for shot previsualization, a key supporting tool in the production pipeline.
- Scenes and props: Tripo-generated scene and prop models were imported into TapNow's Director Stage to previsualize shots, breaking away from blind trial and error with prompts alone.
- Stage first, then generate: gpt-image-2 produced the art assets in pre-production, Tripo output the 3D assets, and TapNow used them to finish camera staging before generating the AI live-action footage.
