NetEase's 'Tianxia' IP and Volcano Engine Cut Production Costs by 95% with AI Short Film 'Qianying'

NetEase's "Tianxia" IP, marking its 18th anniversary, has teamed up with Volcano Engine to produce an AI-driven short film titled "Qianying" featuring spokesperson Joey Wong. The film surpassed 10 million views within three days of release and is described as the first AI short film authorized by a celebrity in the gaming industry, with related topics trending across multiple social platforms.

According to the production team, the TVC was completed by a small in-house virtual production group at NetEase, led by a director with several members handling pre-production design, AI generation, and post-production audio. Traditional production typically requires a cross-functional team of dozens, with budgets ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of yuan for sets, talent fees, and post-production. The new workflow reduced production costs by 95%, bringing the total to tens of thousands of yuan, and trimmed the team size to single digits.

The core capabilities come from the integration of the latest Monet canvas tool on NetEase's Dream Maker platform and Volcano Engine's model suite. Monet is an AI node-based canvas tool that unifies text, image, and video AI nodes into an infinitely expandable visual workspace. Creators can build a video production pipeline by dragging and connecting nodes, and directly invoke Volcano Engine's Seedance 2.0 4K model to achieve high consistency and controllability in generating environments, lighting, effects, and a younger-looking Joey Wong.

Volcano Engine also leverages its Doubao model family, including the Seedance video generation model, Seedream image generation model, and Seed-Audio audio generation model, alongside copyright compliance mechanisms to support timely production and release of marketing assets.