HKAIIFF 2026 · Official film record
Glaze Before Lightning
雷落釉上
[ Film / Synopsis ]
An imperial kiln apprentice sees forbidden landscapes moving beneath wet glaze on the night a lightning strike threatens the entire firing.
In a mountain kiln town, apprentice potter A-Zhen is assigned to watch a sealed firing prepared for the provincial court. Hours before dawn, lightning travels through the kiln roof and the wet test bowls begin displaying moving landscapes: a flooded market, a red forest, a bridge built from porcelain shards. The master potters call them defects, but A-Zhen recognises details from workers’ dreams recorded in charcoal around the workshop. As heat rises and the firing chamber cracks, she crosses the production compound searching for the hand that painted an unapproved mineral layer. Real clay, smoke, glaze chemistry, and full-scale kiln light provide the image foundation. Generated transformations remain attached to physical surfaces and precisely planned camera moves, allowing impossible worlds to emerge from material behaviour rather than decorative effect. The mystery unfolds through texture, labour, and what a workshop chooses to erase.
“For achieving exceptional material precision, controlled camera language, and luminous historical fantasy through a disciplined fusion of practical ceramics and generated imagery.”International Jury citation
- Director
- Shen Yiqiao
- Production entity
- Pale Kiln Screenworks · Generative Image Unit
- Entity type
- Legacy production company AI division
- Country / region
- China
- Runtime
- 83 min
- Language
- Mandarin
- Format
- 6K · 2.39:1 · 7.1 mix
- Genre
- Historical material fantasy
- Completed
- 21 June 2026
- Production window
- 16 months
- Festival master / version
- Festival master v2.0 · checksum locked
[ Named authorship / Principal credits ]
Creative team
[ Production entity / Profile ]
Pale Kiln Screenworks · Generative Image Unit
Pale Kiln Screenworks is a long-established independent production house whose Generative Image Unit specialises in material-led visual effects and historical production design. The unit builds each synthetic element from photographed objects, controlled lighting studies, and art-department rules.
[ 51% Standard / Assessed creative participation ]
78%
AI participation is assessed across the full chain of authorship, supported by journals, model logs, version histories, stems and finishing records.
[ Capability record / 2026 signal ]
Where this film points
- Controllable cinematography
- Hybrid capture + generation
The film demonstrates that generated imagery can follow exact lenses, surfaces, and camera choreography across a feature. It predicts visual departments organised around material capture and controllable synthesis rather than prompt-only shot production.
Craft artists and filmmakers alone judged the cultural meaning of the ceramics and which visual transformations belonged to the workers’ story.
[ Landscape Under Wet Glaze ]
A-Zhen rotates a bowl as a miniature bridge appears beneath the translucent surface. The camera move follows a preplanned macro arc around real fired clay.
[ Production method / Documented workflow ]
How the film was made
The record distinguishes authored decisions, bounded machine operations and final human approvals across the production chain.
The writing team tied every impossible landscape to a worker, mineral trace, and dramatic clue before any image exploration began.
Actors worked inside practical kiln environments, and their selected takes established the spatial and emotional timing for all later transformations.
Macro ceramic photography, measured lens paths, material scans, and constrained generation produced transformations that remain bound to glaze, smoke, and fired surfaces.
Editors controlled the reveal of each landscape and removed visually impressive shots that weakened the mystery or disrupted material continuity.
Kiln resonance, clay handling, roof impacts, and composed low strings keep the fantasy grounded in workshop scale and physical danger.
The unit archived source ceramics, lighting references, camera paths, permissions, generation settings, rejected variants, and final composites.
“For achieving exceptional material precision, controlled camera language, and luminous historical fantasy through a disciplined fusion of practical ceramics and generated imagery.”
[ Records / Rights / Provenance ]
Reviewer-ready evidence
Shot intentions, art-department rules, selected plates, composite decisions, and rejected image directions are indexed by scene.
The ledger covers performers, crafted objects, surface scans, location plates, intended transformations, usage periods, and withdrawal procedures.
Image lineage, material-specific adapters, licensed additions, shot seeds, lens constraints, and prohibited motifs are preserved.
The package contains the 6K picture master, mix, subtitles, access files, composite index, cue sheet, and checksum record.