---
title: "Unique Friends | Chai Wen of Yijie Chuangxiang: AI Breaks Ground, and Everything Grows"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research Substack"
originalPublishedAt: "2025-11-19T12:51:19+00:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251119-03html"
source: "https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251119-03html"
language: "en"
---

# Unique Friends | Chai Wen of Yijie Chuangxiang: AI Breaks Ground, and Everything Grows

_Original · Unique Research · 2025-11-19_

Editorial note: This English edition preserves every substantive unit of the public historical source, including all its questions and quoted answers. The source itself supplies no answer after Q9 and moves directly to Q10; that gap is retained and no answer has been invented. Film credits, career history and production capabilities are reported by the source or interviewee, not independently verified here. Product ideas described as goals, plans or visions remain proposals, not confirmed releases. Yijie Chuangxiang is a romanization of 艺界创想, not a separately verified official English company name.

When AI Meets a Director's Mindset: Continually Reinventing Through Co-Creation with AI

Looking only at Chai Wen's résumé, it is hard to imagine these two worlds fitting together:

On one side, she was an internet product manager at businesses such as Baidu International and the Opera browser;

on the other, she was a visual-effects producer on major films such as The Battle at Lake Changjin and The Volunteers trilogy.

Chai Wen is the person who forcefully bridged those two industries.

At 32, she left the internet industry for film and television. To many people, it looked like a late and risky career change. In her own telling, however, she had merely changed course; her "North Star" never changed: creating valuable products for people.

The internet is about efficiency; film and television are about emotion. The former is a tool, the latter a dream.

And people naturally need both convenient tools and dreams in which they can linger.

Seen this way, it becomes clear why, when AI arrived, her first question was not, "Will this disruption cost me my job?" Instead, she was certain of what had to happen: reconstruct, co-create, and renew.

I. From Product Manager to the Visual-Effects Industry: A Road with No U-Turn

Before entering film and television, Chai Wen spent years as a product manager. She knew the internet mindset intimately: metrics, conversion, optimized user journeys, and closed feedback loops.

She did not leave those experiences behind. They quietly found their way into every project she later undertook.

Yijie Chuangxiang did not replicate a traditional film-production company. It was more like transplanting an internet product team's way of working into the film-production workflow.

She and her team worked on some of China's most demanding visual-effects projects: The Battle at Lake Changjin, The Volunteers, The Wandering Earth, Moon Man, and more. Behind those titles lay ingenious creative design, the coordination of hundreds or thousands of shots, and the continual replacement and iteration of technical solutions. The work brought rationality and emotion into collision and repeatedly tested the limits of human capacity.

So when AI entered her field of vision, her instinctive response was: How can AI's "left brain"—the rational engine skilled at computation—efficiently serve the creator's wildly imaginative and emotionally intuitive "right brain"?

II. AI Builds the Bones, Creativity Supplies the Blood, and Experience Shapes the Soul

When describing the company's current positioning, she used a vivid phrase: AI builds the bones, creativity supplies the blood, and experience shapes the soul.

Taken word by word, it is actually a very clear division of responsibilities:

Bones: AI constructs the underlying form—the script, storyboards, concepts, and atmosphere. The foundational and exploratory work that demands time is handed to the machine;

Blood: creators inject style and aesthetics—composition, color, and visual language. People still decide whether it looks good and whether it has the right character;

Soul: experience provides the final judgment—the story's emotional pacing, the tension in a shot, the character arc, which frame should pause, and which line needs silence around it. These are things only people who have spent long hours on sets and over footage truly understand.

Her goal is not merely to build a highly efficient production team, but to define everyone on it as a "director" in the world of AI creation.

AI can generate a vast number of possibilities in seconds, but which one does this particular film truly need?

Which one will mean something to the audience?

A parameter search cannot answer those questions.

So she set a simple goal: direct the AI.

Let the model grow the bones and muscles of the world, while she and her team decide where that body should go, what it should say, and what kind of person it should become.

That may sound abstract, but in everyday work it becomes a series of very concrete decisions.

For example, AI can offer dozens of compositions for the same shot: should the camera run alongside a soldier, or look down from a god's-eye view?

For example, in the same exchange, a character might look calm, smile, or break down. Which expression best fits the story's arc?

Every such choice is an expression of the director's mindset.

She is candid about it: AI's rationality and the emotional intuition of content creation are not opposites; together they are composing a new movement.

"AI provides precise ‘notes’ and a ‘score,’ while our existing creative experience is the ‘composer’ who can hear the wind, read the tears, and understand how to stir an audience's emotions. What we are doing is learning and mastering this new musical language, using it to compose one-of-a-kind works of the future that possess both science-fiction-like precision and poetry-like warmth."

III. A Production Laboratory for Professional Directors and Ordinary People Alike

Serving only top directors, producers, and core creative teams would still amount to repeating the company's previous trajectory.

It would be enough to work on familiar projects with familiar partners and improve workflow efficiency.

But Chai Wen set Yijie Chuangxiang a more difficult, twofold objective:

one end serves professional creators, and the other ordinary users;

one end sits at the pinnacle of industrial production, and the other begins with every person's impulse to create.

For professional directors and core creative teams, she hopes to become the ultimate production partner.

In her vision, this is a production laboratory in the truest sense.

It has mature AI workflows, a deep reservoir of visual experience accumulated across projects, and a technical team willing to experiment and fail.

A creator need only arrive with the kind of story they want to film. Together with this system, they can quickly refine a vague concept into an executable plan—from concept development, visual style, and animated storyboards to the finished film. They can even explore the next generation of narrative forms together.

For ordinary users, she wants to build a dream-realization engine that fits in their pockets.

That part of the ambition is larger, and more difficult.

The film industry is full of maddeningly complex processes: asset management, version control, shot breakdowns, compositing rules, rendering parameters, and more.

In her plan, all of them will eventually be packaged into experience modules and building-block-style workflows.

You will not need to know how to operate film-production software or learn an entire professional vocabulary. You only need to know what kind of story you want to tell, what characters and settings you want, and what genre you have in mind. A sufficiently friendly and intuitive interface can help you clarify those intentions, and mature frameworks can then let you freely create the work you envision.

Professional capabilities are compressed and packaged away, hidden out of sight yet still within reach.

This is not an unsupported fantasy; it follows a very clear product logic.

If only professionals can use AI to make professional content, fewer strong works will have the opportunity to reach the world.

If ordinary people can also use professional workflows to create content, that truly pushes the boundaries of creative capability much farther outward.

"We want to build a bridge: professional capability on one side, and every ordinary person's desire for self-expression on the other."

IV. An AI Director Is Not a Job Title, but a Way of Acting

Directing was once understood as a profession with an extremely high barrier to entry, something that could even feel beyond reach.

But in the AI era, anyone who takes action can become the director of their own work. Good ideas that could not be realized because of constraints such as time and cost can now be brought to life with AI.

What Chai Wen and her team are doing is lowering the barrier to learning a maze of AI tools, sharing the experience they have accumulated, and "co-creating" with more people. Together, they aim to break down the barriers to creation so that more, better, and more moving stories can reach audiences.

V. Before AI Reconstructs the Industry, We Must Reconstruct Our Fear of Being Replaced

If we see ourselves merely as "operators" inside a particular piece of software, sooner or later we will be replaced.

But if we see ourselves as the "lead directors" of the work, AI will simply become a more powerful set of tools in our hands.

Yijie Chuangxiang's practice over the past few years has itself been a process of continual reconstruction:

We have taken the beautifully finished product of the traditional film industry apart with our own hands—not to destroy it, but to examine the value of every fragment through the thinking of AI and the internet. The process is full of unknowns. We need to experiment repeatedly to find the most suitable piece of the puzzle. Whenever a critical fragment clicks perfectly into place, the sudden joy of understanding becomes the source of all our motivation. Our firmest inner conviction is this: never compromise on the final image. Every exploration and every experiment is undertaken to reach that inevitable future.

What will the next generation of work look like?

No one can provide a standard answer.

But in what Chai Wen and Yijie Chuangxiang are doing, several outlines are at least beginning to emerge:

works will take shape in production faster, but they will not necessarily become shallower—provided someone remains uncompromising about telling a good story;

the gulf between professional creators and ordinary users will gradually be filled by new tools and workflows;

if you are a creator, it may be difficult not to feel anxious.

But perhaps you can try asking a different question:

instead of asking where AI will squeeze me out, ask: in an era when I can direct AI, where am I willing to stand?

Selected Interview Q&A

Q1: If you had to describe yourself with three labels, what would they be, and why?

Chai Wen: My three labels are reconstruction, co-creation, and renewal. I moved from the internet industry into film and television, and then embraced AI; at each step, I was reconstructing an established path. I do not treat AI as an adversary, but as a partner with whom I can create. All these efforts are intended to renew both the way we create and the forms our works take.

Q2: Why did you dare to move from the internet industry into film and television in your thirties?

Chai Wen: To others, it looked like a late and risky career change. To me, it was simply a change of course. Whether I was working on internet products or on films, my North Star remained the same: creating value for real people. The internet optimizes efficiency in the real world; film and television build landscapes in our inner world. Tools and dreams both ultimately serve people.

Q3: In your view, what does the arrival of AI bring: a threat or an opportunity?

Chai Wen: I have never treated AI as a cause for panic. I see it as an opportunity to co-create. For a film-production team like ours, AI has not come to take our jobs; it has come to help us take apart, reorganize, and accelerate established processes.

Q4: How would you sum up Yijie Chuangxiang's core positioning in one sentence?

Chai Wen: In one sentence: AI builds the bones, creativity supplies the blood, and experience shapes the soul.

AI helps us build the world's skeleton and muscles. Creativity determines the body's character and style, while the experience we have accumulated over years of major film projects gives it a heartbeat, breath, and soul.

Q5: How do you view AI's rationality and the emotional intuition of content creation? Are they opposed?

Chai Wen: To me, they are not opposites; they are more like two voices in a new piece of music. AI is responsible for the rationality, precision, and computationally constructed structure, while our creative experience hears the wind, understands where the tears lie, and knows when to pause and when to move forward. Only when the two work together can a piece have both the precision of science fiction and the warmth of poetry.

Q6: What form does your operation take now: an individual, a studio, or a fully fledged company?

Chai Wen: We are a fully fledged film-production company, handling the entire production process. Our team has mature, end-to-end experience in everything from early-stage art concept design to post-production, commercial shoots, promotional CG for games, and animated shorts. That enables us to validate AI workflows on industrial-scale projects rather than remaining at the Demo or concept stage.

Q7: Is your previous experience as an internet product manager still useful to you?

Chai Wen: Extremely useful.

What I learned as a product manager at Baidu International and Opera was how to understand users, design processes, and use data feedback to improve the experience. I now apply those methods to film, television, and AI. We are not simply producing content to order; we are redesigning the entire product form of creation: how the workflow runs, how ideas are realized, and how to help more users accept and understand the work's central point.

Q8: You have said you want to be the ultimate production partner for professional creators. What does that mean in practice?

Chai Wen: For professional directors, we hope to be an open production laboratory. They can bring us their wildest ideas, and we can combine AI workflows with our previous visual-effects experience to help them find a more efficient, more consistently reliable path to realization. We can also explore the next generation of narrative forms together.

Q9: What do you want to build for ordinary users?

Q10: If you had to summarize your long-term vision in one sentence, what would it be?

Chai Wen: Our vision is to build a bridge.

At one end of the bridge is professional production capability; at the other is every ordinary person's impulse to create. AI forms the skeleton between them, while creativity and experience supply the blood and shape the soul, bringing about true "reconstruction" and "co-creation." Together, we want to help break down the barriers to creation and bring more, better, and more moving stories to audiences.

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Original publication: https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251119-03html
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251119-03html