HKAIIFF 2026 · Official film record
Roommates in the Render Queue
渲染隊列的室友
[ Film / Synopsis ]
Three film students share one overheated computer, one impossible deadline, and a practical monster that refuses to stay inside the generated background.
Final-year roommates Yan, Bo, and Kiki must finish separate graduation films before sunrise, but their dormitory has one capable workstation and a render queue stretching six hours. They negotiate time slots, trade storage, and tape a practical foam creature to the ceiling while generated backgrounds fail in increasingly specific ways. When the creature’s shadow is mistaken for a tracking marker, all three projects begin contaminating one another: a period romance gains tentacles, a cooking documentary acquires moonlight, and a silent dance film inherits subtitles from the wrong timeline. The students abandon individual perfection and combine their footage into one frantic short. Live puppetry, improvised acting, and constrained image repair keep the comedy physical. Beneath the jokes is an affectionate portrait of shared tools, bruised ambition, and the collective intelligence that appears when a queue makes solitary authorship impossible.
“For exuberant comic timing, inventive resource sharing, and a student-scale hybrid workflow that turns technical limitation into character, chaos, and charm.”International Jury citation
- Director
- Cheng Pui-yan
- Production entity
- Harbour Dormitory Film Unit
- Entity type
- Student production
- Country / region
- Hong Kong
- Runtime
- 24 min
- Language
- Cantonese · English
- Format
- 4K · 1.85:1 · 5.1 mix
- Genre
- Campus practical-effects comedy
- Completed
- 28 March 2026
- Production window
- 5 months
- Festival master / version
- Festival master v1.0 · checksum locked
[ Named authorship / Principal credits ]
Creative team
[ Production entity / Profile ]
Harbour Dormitory Film Unit
Harbour Dormitory Film Unit is a temporary student production formed by six Hong Kong film students sharing equipment, editing time, and practical-effects materials. The unit uses lightweight synthetic tools only where the team can understand and repair the result.
[ 51% Standard / Assessed creative participation ]
54%
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
- Neural performance transfer
- Hybrid capture + generation
The film demonstrates that modest hybrid tools can amplify practical comedy without replacing student craft. It predicts campus production cultures organised around shared queues, repair literacy, and collaborative authorship.
The students alone performed the comedy, built the creature, resolved authorship conflicts, and decided which technical accidents improved the film.
[ Tentacle in the Timeline ]
A foam creature crosses three mismatched student projects on adjacent monitors while the roommates race to identify the shared source clip. The gag resolves in-camera.
[ 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 students mapped three competing projects and one shared deadline, then improvised scene complications within a hand-written continuity board.
Cast members rehearsed physical comedy with the foam creature, and selected human takes determined every later synthetic adjustment.
Practical puppetry and dormitory photography lead, with small generated extensions and repairs constrained by available tracking and hardware.
The shared timeline preserves accidental collisions between projects while human editors control escalation, reaction timing, and narrative clarity.
Room tone, fan noise, improvised Foley, and a compact score turn hardware stress into comic rhythm without obscuring dialogue.
The unit archived consent forms, shared-source lists, practical plates, prompt notes, settings, timeline versions, and final delivery files.
“For exuberant comic timing, inventive resource sharing, and a student-scale hybrid workflow that turns technical limitation into character, chaos, and charm.”
[ Records / Rights / Provenance ]
Reviewer-ready evidence
The record maps each gag to its writer, practical source, performance take, synthetic adjustment, and editorial timing.
Cast, voice, artwork, dormitory, music, and shared-footage permissions define student use, release scope, and withdrawal procedures.
Local and hosted component lineage, project inputs, seeds, settings, source limits, and deleted test materials are preserved.
The package includes the picture master, mix, subtitles, access files, shared-source manifest, cue sheet, and checksum record.