100% AI-Created Historical Epic: Loyal Souls

The Chin-Chu wars, inspired by the Hubei Museum relic “Black-Fu Wooden Tablet,” it retells—through a group portrait—the untold stories of loyal souls sacrificed to feudal dynasties.

Inspiration
This AI-powered historical film was inspired by the “Hei-Fu Wooden Slips” housed in the Hubei Provincial Museum—wartime letters sent from Qin soldiers during the Qin–Chu conflict. Despite being over two millennia old, these documents preserve the raw emotions of fear, loyalty, and longing from ordinary men on the battlefield. Our goal was to use AI-generated imagery and storytelling to restore the human dimension behind this monumental war. Through the strategic decisions of generals like Wang Jian and Li Xin, juxtaposed with the fragile and intimate lives of soldiers such as Heifu and Jing, we reconnect audiences with the warmth and weight of history.

What it does
The film reconstructs the Qin–Chu War—from the initial offensive led by Li Xin to Wang Jian’s decisive 600,000-strong campaign and the eventual unification of China. It portrays both the macro-level strategies of the generals and the micro-level emotional lives of ordinary soldiers. Through letters, battlefield choices, and the constant fear of death, the story reveals the human cost behind a monumental empire. AI-generated visuals bring to life palaces, war rooms, battlefields, and the quiet homes the soldiers longed to return to, embodying the central theme: an empire rises not only on the brilliance of its generals but on the silent loyalty of the unnamed.

How we built it
Utilize ChatGPT for research, scriptwriting, and voice-over text generation.
Use the Seedream 2.1 model to create images and the Seedream 3.0 model to generate videos.
All script content is adapted from authentic historical contexts and archaeological documents, with character motivations further developed by referencing the “Blackfu Wooden Tablets.”
For battle scenes, a multi-version comparative approach is adopted: AI generates a large pool of footage, from which the best shots are manually selected and edited.
The final product is an AI-produced historical short film that balances historical authenticity, emotional depth, and cinematic narrative structure.

Challenges we ran into
Balancing historical accuracy with artistic style: AI visuals often required extensive refinement to match the aesthetics of the period.
Maintaining character consistency: Ensuring that key characters remain visually coherent across scenes was technically challenging.
Large-scale battle compositions: Coordinating crowd movement, spatial depth, dust, and fire effects demanded multi-model synchronization.
Narrative pacing: Integrating historical narration, character arcs, and emotional transitions into a cohesive cinematic flow required significant iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of
Successfully reimagined a major historical war through AI while honoring both great generals and unnamed soldiers.
Achieved high-fidelity reconstruction of Warring States environments and material culture.
Developed a grounded narrative centered on Heifu—an ordinary soldier drawn from real archaeological documents.
Delivered an epic-scale AI film within a rapid production cycle, showcasing what small creative teams can achieve with new tools.

What we learned
AI is not just a tool—it is a new lens through which we can reinterpret history.
The grander the historical event, the more powerful it becomes when seen through the eyes of ordinary individuals.
Multi-model collaboration will be essential for future AI filmmaking pipelines.
Historical artifacts, even humble letters, can carry emotional truths that surpass battle scenes.

What's next for Loyal Souls
Expand the ‘History of the Nameless’ series, presenting an epic narrative grounded in the perspectives of ordinary people. Build a reusable AI-powered archive of historical imagery that can visually reconstruct multiple dynasties. Collaborate with archaeologists and historians so that, beyond storytelling, the AI-generated visuals also meet scholarly standards.