Hundred Flowers Awards’ First AIGC Unit Names Six Winners

The AIGC submission channel was open for just over a month. The Douyin topic #JimengHundredFlowersAIGC accumulated 110 million views during the call. A final jury comprising directors Tang Jili, Yu Baimei, Yi Xiaoxing, Zhou Difei and Lu Xin, a professor at Communication University of China, selected 30 works for final review. Twenty-four works received “finalist honors,” and six works received “Hundred Flowers AIGC recommendation honors.”

The six honored works were “Yi Meng” (best animation), “Lai Shi Lu” (best visual effects), “Whale Song” (best technical work), “Ye Cha Du He” (best creative work), “Out of Control” (best director) and “Broken Sheath” (best short film). After watching the six works in full, the on-site audience voted “Broken Sheath” as the audience favorite.

Several winning creators said Jimeng AI and Seedance models helped with multi-reference inputs, style control, camera generation, dialect dubbing and emotional continuity. Zhang Bohan, a representative of “Yi Meng” and an undergraduate student, said animation had long been the team’s dream but often cost too much in the past. “The emergence of AI gave our dream a way to be realized.” Zhu Jingtian from “Lai Shi Lu” said AI enabled ideas that were hard to achieve in traditional filmmaking to be realized at lower cost, and Jimeng was better at understanding and presenting Chinese aesthetic style. Zhong Qiling from “Whale Song” said the AI-generated video was “so emotionally coherent that we almost did not need to edit,” and compared AI to “an efficient crew provided to a director” that turns mental images into footage. Lu Qiwei from “Ye Cha Du He” said that with Seedance 2.0, creators could hand over character assets, scene assets, style descriptions, color systems and directorial scheduling to the model, then judge, choose and organize the output. He stressed that when AI generates a large amount of material, creators still make the choices as directors.

Liu Shuheng from “Out of Control” said AI “really lowers the threshold for making images, but at the same time raises the requirement for creators to know why they shoot this way.” Sun Buer from “Broken Sheath” said the biggest help from AI was “reopening the creative range,” enabling small teams to handle scene scales that were previously hard to complete independently.

Jury members also discussed the technology’s effect on filmmaking. Tang Jili, a veteran director with 46 years in the industry, said AIGC lowers the threshold for “making movies.” “If I had made a work like Broken Sheath in the past, it would have cost at least 20 million to 30 million yuan,” he said. “Now two people can complete it.” He called the technological progress an unprecedented opportunity for young filmmakers. Zhou Difei, speaking from visual-effects production experience, said AI was “a process of technological equalization” and noted his current projects include university students or recent graduates in technical development. Yu Baimei described AI’s entry into the film industry as “milk poured into water, a molecule-to-molecule combination, rather than a cup of milk replacing a cup of water.” Yi Xiaoxing said AI can understand and analyze humor but has difficulty writing it, because the “subtle dislocation” is often the source of a laugh, and advised creators not to worry but to “turn AI into our exclusive tool.” Lu Xin said creators need to stabilize their spiritual core and build systematic aesthetic knowledge, and that audiences are still drawn to stories about people, emotion and life.

Jimeng AI said the works show AIGC is entering specific creative processes rather than remaining a technology demonstration. “AI does not replace aesthetics, narrative or directorial judgment,” a Jimeng AI representative said. “It allows more visual ideas to be completed through a shorter chain, lower cost and a more flexible trial-and-error space.” The company said it will keep releasing advanced models, refining professional tools and expanding its creator ecosystem to help more young creators bring ideas to larger stages.