AIGC Tools: Jimeng, Keling, Nano Banana, Runway, MidJourney, Google Flow, ChatGPT, Gemini

BGM: Waltz No.10 in B Minor, Op.69 No.2 — Claudio Arrau

Live-action footage was filmed at the site of Xinghua Instrument Factory ruins, Meishan, Sichuan Province



The short film LAB 867 draws inspiration from the ruins of the 867 Xinghua Factory in Meishan. Born out of the Cold War–era “Third Front” construction, the factory once carried the mission of developing atomic clocks and a unified time system, providing precise timekeeping for aerospace and national defense. In 2006, it was fully relocated to Chengdu, leaving the original site in total abandonment.

LAB 867 seeks to intervene in the singular narrative of time through moving images. We imagine a fictional institution named “Lab 867,” driven by the ambition to control power by establishing the standard of time. This fiction mirrors the historical logic that truly existed during the Cold War: under the guise of precision and unification, time was disciplined, instrumentalized, and became a silent shackle of social order. The imagery of ruins becomes the most powerful metaphor for time: it bears the weight of past missions and the inevitability of collapse; in its desolation and decay, the resonance of time is even more pronounced. The film’s protagonist embodies a form of resistance: against the institutional regime of “time control,” individual sensory experience emerges as another kind of truth. The film suggests that the essence of mastering time lies not in flawless calculation, but in perceiving the flow of its passage—thus rediscovering the inner tension between time and life.

Through the use of AI tools, surreal imagery is rendered tangible, allowing the abandoned industrial site to converse across time and space with a fictional psychic realm. What the audience perceives is not a retelling of the past, but an echo between the present and the eternal—cinema as an experiment in perception, memory, and existence.



Story Synopsis

The protagonist possesses a rare ability: to perceive time in concrete form. For this reason, he is captured and exploited by “Lab 867,” an organization devoted to developing atomic clocks and pursuing the ultimate standard of precision. His inner world is forcibly wired into the experimental field, where his first-person consciousness is projected and monitored in real time—an attempt to extract the secret of mastering time.

Within the ruins of consciousness, he wanders through disordered temporalities, experiencing multiple forms of time perception. As the tension that time inscribes upon his body, mind, and environment becomes ever clearer, he realizes that only resistance and destruction can shatter the organization’s fantasy of “precise time.” When the drugs wear off and his awareness resurfaces, the ruins collapse into flat ground in his perception, and the institution’s ambition to “control time” dissolves into nothingness.


 

(This film was produced in Qinhuangdao Aranya, during the Aranya Wave Film Festival, as part of the 48-hour AI Film Hackathon competition.)