A poetic sci-fi satire blending live action, ICVFX virtual production, and AI-assisted image/sound practices.
In a near future where gravity shifts and sound disappears, two survivors travel through a ruptured landscape—until their connection reveals what society has engineered out of being human.
Short Film · Sci-Fi / Satire · Hybrid AI–ICVFX VP · 24 Min. · 2026 · Korea / China
Short Synopsis
In the era of the “25th hour,” time feels cracked—gravity behaves strangely, and the world’s natural soundscape has thinned toward silence. Sehee moves through the aftermath as a field collector searching for what remains: traces of lost sound and the last resilient signs of life. She meets Jihoon, an older man who appears to have chosen isolation over survival’s new rules. Their uneasy journey becomes an experiment in trust. But as their bond deepens, the boundary between human need and machine design begins to blur—and Sehee is forced to confront what empathy costs in a world built for efficiency.
Director’s Note
25th Hour began with a simple anxiety: what happens when a society treats empathy as inefficient? I wanted to imagine a future where rational order has “solved” human messiness—emotion, grief, tenderness—only to discover that the cost is ecological and existential. When you remove empathy, you don’t just change how people treat each other; you change what kinds of worlds they are willing to live in.Sehee and Jihoon embody a tension I’ve been circling for years: the difference between living as calculation and living as care. Sehee moves through the ruins with an almost irrational devotion to traces—lost sounds, fragile organisms, small signs that the world still breathes. Jihoon represents the temptation of control: to make life manageable by making it less human. Their relationship is not a conventional romance; it’s an emotional test under pressure, a slow collision between two philosophies of time and survival.Form mattered as much as story. I wanted the film to feel like it occurs in a crack in reality—beautiful, quiet, and slightly unstable. The “25th hour” is my name for that rupture: a moment beyond ordinary time when the world reveals what it has been suppressing. Ultimately, the film argues that our crises—environmental, social, political—share a root: a failure of empathy. Not as sentimentality, but as an ethical sensor that tells us what must not be optimized away.
Hybrid Production (AI + ICVFX Virtual Production)
25th Hour was produced through a hybrid workflow combining live-action shooting with in-camera VFX virtual production (ICVFX) and AI-assisted processes. Virtual production enabled us to stage impossible environments and long-scale landscapes while preserving physical performance and on-set lighting interaction. AI tools were used as part of an experimental pipeline for visual development, concept iteration, and select image/sound explorations—extending the film’s themes of perception, memory, and engineered reality while keeping authorship grounded in live action and editorial decision-making.Tools (optional, if you want transparency):Midjourney · Runway · Topaz Video · Gigapixel · LumaLabs · KlingAI · Adobe tools · ChatGPT (development & iteration)
Empathy vs efficiency · Sound as memory · Human–machine intimacy · Ruptured time (“25th hour”)
