Description
Unbuilt is an oil-painted sci-fi animated short, made as a gift for the author's self ten years from now. Twenty-four-year-old Lin Yi receives a yellow gift box created by AI. Inside is a living miniature Hong Kong. When she touches it, her room unfolds into the city, and she steps into a constructed world.
From a Hong Kong tram to a Shanghai office and a New York apartment, she tries out lives that seem increasingly desirable. Yet the more AI predicts her needs, recommends her choices and answers for her, the harder it is to hear her own voice. In New York she meets her thirty-four-year-old self, but even this future self cannot tell her how never to choose wrong. When another ideal life appears before her, Lin Yi pulls back the hand that was about to generate again and turns toward the real door. She leaves without a perfect answer, but with the courage to set out.
Unbuilt describes both a world still under construction and a life whose future remains open. The gift is not a blueprint for guaranteed happiness but room left for the future self: permission to stay uncertain, to change direction and to make choices for oneself. It is for that future self, and for anyone afraid of choosing wrong.
Oil-painting textures, blue cityscapes and warm interior light tie the cities together. A yellow square smile serves as the AI's recurring visual identity, while architectural wireframes that emerge and dissolve reveal how its worlds are built. ChatGPT assisted with story development, storyboards, character and set design, keyframe images and video prompts, and PixVerse turned the original keyframes into motion. Storyboarding, editing, dialogue and sound design were human-led, with close control of character consistency, spatial direction and continuity across shots, so the technology serves the characters' emotions and the story.
How Tripo was used
Tripo gave the idea of giving someone a world a concrete spatial form: the 3D assets for the miniature Hong Kong inside the gift box were generated with Tripo.
- Spatial reference: the assets guide the building masses, street layout and spatial relationships inside the box.
- The turning point: combined with oil-painted keyframes, image-to-video and editing, they help show the city emerging from the box and unfolding into a world she can step into.
- Division of work: Tripo handled the 3D assets; character performance, visual style and the final motion came from other tools and human work.
