'Shoestring crew' puts drama and passion back into videos

'Handcrafted' videos

Real shooting is something Haojiahuo insists on. While artificial intelligence can quickly generate digital scenes, they prefer shooting in a studio setting if an appropriate live location can't be found.

For one production, when they failed to find a suitable spot in Xi'an to film muddy marshes and pools, they went to Hengdian World Studios, the country's largest film and television production base, in Zhejiang province.

The costs were five or six times higher than AI-generated videos. They take a painstaking, old-fashioned approach. If there is no suitable setting, they build one themselves. If a shot is not good enough, they shoot it repeatedly until they are satisfied.

In August 2025, the team shot two videos in the mountains of Shandong province. Temperatures exceeded 40 C, but the stories were set in autumn and winter.

To make the shoot appear authentic, the actors insisted on wearing thick military uniforms and ran repeatedly up a mountainside for some scenes.

The crew prepared 20 boxes of Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui, a traditional Chinese herbal tonic used to prevent heatstroke and maintain energy, and finished all of them in one afternoon.

Some performers collapsed from heat exhaustion. A total of about 60 extras dwindled to 13 by the end. Even some local extras found the conditions too harsh and left.

This attention to detail can be seen in Nanjing 1937.

The team spent 11 months polishing the script, studied a large amount of historical material, and verified details such as gun-holding postures, striving for an authentic replication of the era.

The heavy subject matter also posed an enormous psychological strain. While studying historical material and during shooting, members often found it difficult to keep their emotions in check.

Almost the entire film uses real people and real scenes. Post-production special effects were used for aircraft flyovers, wire removal and some burning shots, which could not be safely filmed live.

Zhang said someone once asked why he paid such high production costs when AI is capable of generating similar war scenes.

In fact, AI tools have indeed proved popular for textbook adaptations. Accounts like@haizide yitangke (A Lesson with Yitang) on Douyin — created by father Wang Chuang for his third-grade daughter — have garnered millions of followers by placing the daughter into AI-generated scroll paintings to interact with historical figures.

"I found that adults' language is too heavy for children. Instead, this AI format makes her more able to listen and take it in," Wang said, adding that every video is a message he wants to tell his daughter.

"When she later encounters failure, loneliness, gains and losses, and choices, perhaps I will not be by her side. She need not be afraid, because the people and things she learned from Chinese language textbooks will still be there," Wang said.

However, for Zhang and the @Haojiahuo team, digital generation falls short when depicting deep human experience. Zhang noted that in some situations, such as an explosion, the human body naturally feels fear and tries to evade the danger. "That look and subtle movement are the reality we want to preserve, and something AI finds very difficult to simulate," he said.

In depictions of real suffering, AI images can appear distorted and stiff. This can easily mislead young audiences, and runs counter to the original intention of remembering history.

Their videos typically run from 10 to 40 minutes, and viewers watch them in full. "Quality content has its own appeal to audiences," said lead actor Zhang Zhiyuan.

The videos seek to present historical facts as objectively as possible, avoiding plots designed for entertainment purposes and not imposing subjective conclusions. The audience is given room for judgment and reflection.

While insisting on realism, the team is not immune to the problems of copyright infringement, including AI-assisted copying. Many accounts steal their real-life footage and mass-produce imitation content.

Even so, they believe creators who follow the rules also enrich classroom material.

The team will expand their content to include more historical subjects and try to uncover more stories and characters unfamiliar to the public.

Meanwhile, they are planning to widen their reach to overseas audiences, hoping to connect with them through shared human emotions. "Cultures differ, but emotions are universal," Zhang Shuaipeng said.