Culture & ArtsAI visuals support
From the collapse of heaven and earth to the rebirth of the land, spectacular visuals tell the story of mending the world and protecting humankind.
01 / Background
Liandan AI Studio provided AI visuals for the “Nüwa Mends the Sky” story in CCTV's “Exploring China Through Idioms.” The myth moves from a peaceful world through catastrophe to smelting stones to mend the sky and the rebirth of all things. The grand spectacle had to serve clear cause and effect: viewers needed to recognize the mythical figures and follow the process of mending the sky.
The visual script first set the color progression: from warm gold, to dark chaos, to a rebirth in five colors. We then designed specific shot sizes for the characters, the five-colored stones, the pillars of light and the cracks in heaven and earth. Character identities were checked against the textbook text, and the five-colored stones, the smelting and the closing tribute each have dedicated shots, so the knowledge conveyed matches the picture.
02 / Creative Highlights
Gonggong and Zhuanxu fight amid blue torrents, orange flames and shattered mountains. The camera pulls back from the characters' faces to the whole of heaven and earth as sky, ground and floods fall into disaster layer by layer, making it clear why Nüwa must act.
The five-colored stones appear one by one, followed by swirling divine fire, flowing molten stone, streams of light across the sky and five-colored clouds. The same five colors recur in stone, fire, molten stone and cloud, so viewers can connect the materials, process and result of mending the sky.
Golden pillars rising from the ground into the clouds make “holding up the sky” instantly clear; next to Nüwa, the giant black dragon shows the scale of what she faces. Alternating low angles, wide shots and close-ups gives a sense of grandeur while keeping the focus of each frame clear.
Blue reed ash filling the cracks in the earth is the final repair, followed by flowers, calm mountains and rivers, and a statue of Nüwa. From the fierce conflict of the disaster to a bright, settled world, the mood moves from chaos to rebirth.
03 / Scene Breakdown
The film opens on a golden world: Nüwa creates humans, villages dot the mountains and rivers, and people dance in a circle, until a child looks up and sees dark clouds in the sky.
Nüwa sits among the clouds holding a small clay figure, cutting to a wide view of mountains and rivers and a backlit crowd dancing hand in hand.
A waterfall tumbles down the mountains and villages are scattered across the valley, everything bathed in warm gold.
A child looks up at the sky; in the next shot, dark clouds swirl into a vortex, and the story takes a turn.
Gonggong, god of water, fights Zhuanxu from the heavens down to the human world; badly defeated, Gonggong rams Mount Buzhou in a fit of rage.
Gonggong, wrapped in torrents of water, cuts to a red-robed figure standing in flames. One blue, one red: the two sides are clear at a glance.
A column of fire and a column of water collide in the middle of the frame; then Gonggong is engulfed by waves and starts to stagger.
Gonggong's furious face fills the frame, then he lowers his head and charges, sending rubble flying.
Mount Buzhou, the pillar holding up the sky, breaks; a huge hole opens in the sky, deep chasms split the earth, and floods and wild beasts pour into the human world.
The burning Mount Buzhou splits down the middle as people flee in all directions through falling rocks and firelight.
Lightning darts between the rifts in the sky; in the next shot, the earth splits open into a deep chasm spewing lava.
Giant spiders, a tiger in flames and a fire fox appear one after another as the human world descends into chaos.
Seeing the state of the world, Nüwa resolves to mend the sky: she gathers five-colored stones, lights a divine fire, smelts the stones into molten rock and patches the hole in the sky.
Nüwa, her back to the camera, looks out over the shattered world, followed by a close-up of her face with sparks drifting past.
Nüwa gathers stones in a cave of colored crystals; five stones of different colors float in the air, then the divine fire flares up.
Five-colored lava churns and flows, and a five-colored stream of light slants across the crack in the sky.
Five beams of colored light fall from the sky; the camera pulls back, and the whole sky is filled with five-colored clouds.
Nüwa cuts off the four legs of a giant turtle to hold up the sky, then kills the evil black dragon, and the beasts flee back to the forests.
Nüwa stands beneath the mended sky, then battles a giant divine turtle in the waves; the turtle's leg becomes a pillar marked with shell patterns.
Four golden pillars stand in a sea of clouds as the camera slowly pushes in: the sky will never fall again.
The black dragon, coiled in firelight, lunges with open jaws, and Nüwa raises her sword to meet it.
Nüwa burns reeds into ash to seal the cracks in the earth; heaven and earth return to calm, and people raise a statue in her honor.
A field of reeds catches blue fire, the ash drifts down like snow, and the blue glow in the cracks is filled in bit by bit.
Nüwa stands beneath a sky of five-colored light as the camera turns to the land beneath the clouds, great trees and a lakeside in full bloom.
A white statue of Nüwa stands atop the mountains, and the film ends with auspicious clouds filling the sky and phoenixes flying past.
04 / Storyboards & Final Frames
This episode had a complete image-generation script: shots were broken down line by line from the narration, each with its shot size, lighting and content written out. Below are the final images used in the film, in the order they appear. Close-ups of Nüwa are not included here; you can see them in the clip breakdowns.
Shot 1.1
Nüwa sits among the clouds holding a freshly shaped clay figure, starlight on her body. Semi-transparent like a hologram, she has an imposing presence.
Shot 1.2
Villages dot a vast landscape of mountains and rivers, golden sunlight breaking through the clouds: the film opens in warm gold.
Shot 1.3
A backlit crowd dances hand in hand in a circle, matching the line “laughter and joy filled the land.”
Shot 2.1
Dark clouds fill the sky, swirling into a vortex; from here, the peaceful picture begins to darken.
Shot 2.2
A red-robed figure stands in towering flames, facing the camera head-on, a hot counterpoint to the cool blue water god.
Shot 2.3
A column of fire and a column of water shoot up from the ground and collide in the middle of the frame, flames spilling out on the left and huge waves surging on the right.
Shot 2.4
Gonggong, god of water, is wrapped in torrents, rubble floating around him; he can no longer keep his footing.
Shot 2.5
A close-up of Gonggong's furious face fills half the frame as spray bursts around him.
Shot 2.6
Gonggong charges with his head down, rubble flying through the air; the next shot is the sky pillar breaking.
Shot 3.1
Mount Buzhou, which connects heaven and earth, splits down the middle, firelight glowing through the crack. Shaped like a pillar, the mountain reads at once as the pillar holding up the sky.
Shot 3.2
Lightning darts back and forth across the rifts in the sky as rubble is swept into the air, matching the line “a huge hole suddenly opened in the sky.”
Shot 3.3
The camera follows a deep chasm forward, lava and lightning surging inside it.
Shot 3.4
A swarm of giant spiders crawls out from deep in the forest, matching the line “all kinds of wild beasts ran out of the mountain forests.”
Shot 3.5
Under a dark red sky, a giant tiger lunges through the flames.
Shot 3.6
A fox covered in flames runs through a sea of fire; several mythical beasts appear one after another, showing a world in chaos.
Shot 4.1
Flames swirl into a huge vortex with five colors flowing at its core, matching the line “lit a divine fire to smelt them.”
Shot 4.2
Lava in five colors flows and churns like liquid as the stones are smelted into thick molten rock.
Shot 4.3
A five-colored stream of light slants across the crack in the sky, and the sky is mended in a single stroke.
Shot 4.4
Five beams of different colors cascade from the sky like waterfalls, another appearance of the materials used to mend it.
Shot 4.5
The sky is covered in five-colored clouds, matching the line “from then on, there were five-colored clouds in the sky.” Compared with the earlier blue-and-orange clash of water and fire, here all five colors coexist.
Shot 5.1
Nüwa, her back to the camera, stands between the sea of clouds and the glowing sky, looking at the newly mended heavens.
Shot 5.2
A giant divine turtle raises its head in the waves as Nüwa confronts it, matching the line “cut off the four legs of a giant turtle.”
Shot 5.3
A low-angle close-up of a pillar bearing turtle-shell patterns, rising from the earth to the clouds.
Shot 5.4
Four golden pillars stand in the sea of clouds, glowing as they hold up the sky.
Shot 5.5
Nüwa raises her sword against a black dragon coiled in firelight, the film's final battle.
Shot 5.6
With the black dragon dead, the beasts flee back to the mountains, and the forests grow quiet again.
Shot 6.1
A vast field of reeds is engulfed in blue flames, the palette shifting from the earlier five colors to a cool blue.
Shot 6.2
Blue light glows from the cracks in the earth as the reed ash fills in the fissures where floods were pouring out.
Shot 6.3
The ground is covered in luminous blue ash, and the floods have finally stopped.
Shot 7.1
Nüwa stands above a sea of clouds under a sky of five-colored light, matching the line “heaven and earth finally returned to calm.”
Shot 7.2
Looking down from above the clouds, sunlight falls through the gaps onto green land.
Shot 7.3
Flowers bloom along the lakeshore and warm light falls on the water, echoing the gold of the opening.
Shot 7.4
A rabbit stands on its hind legs against a calm mountain landscape. Compared with the ferocious beasts of the disaster, only gentle little animals remain.
Shot 7.5
A white statue of Nüwa stands atop the mountains, matching the line “people remembered Nüwa for generations.”
Shot 7.6
Shot from the statue's feet looking up, its robes draping over the rocks, showing how towering it is.
Shot 7.7
The film ends with bright auspicious clouds as several phoenixes fly through them.
05 / Script Excerpts
06 / Results
This is the roughly 2 min 16 s story segment from the program, showing how the AI visuals look on air with the program's narration, subtitles and logo. From the collapse of heaven and earth to the rebirth of the land, the process is complete, and changes in the characters, the five-colored stones and the scenery drive the story forward.
Case Study
A hole opened in the sky, and deep chasms split the earth.
Nüwa smelted five-colored stones to mend the sky, cut off a turtle's legs to hold it up, and burned reeds to ash to stop the floods.
This story comes from the primary school Chinese textbook, and it was also an AI story film on CCTV's “Exploring China Through Idioms,” with a broadcast segment of just over two minutes.
With dozens of large-scale shots one after another, how do you keep viewers from getting lost?
01
The original text from the production team came from “Nüwa Mends the Sky” in the national fourth-grade Chinese textbook (Volume 1). We kept the textbook's plot, rewrote it as narration with one line per screen, and then divided the story into five chapters following the narration: Divine Nüwa, Heaven Collapses and Earth Splits, Smelting Stones to Mend the Sky, Slaying the Turtle and the Dragon, and the World Reborn.
The first page of the image-generation script wasn't a shot list but a color plan: warm gold at the start, dark purple during the chaos, and vivid multicolor after the rebirth. Before generating each shot, we first checked which phase it belonged to.
That way, even if viewers miss a line of narration, the colors tell them where the story is.
02
In the textbook, mending the sky takes several steps: gathering five-colored stones, smelting them in divine fire, turning them into molten stone, patching the hole, five-colored clouds appearing, cutting off the turtle's legs to hold up the sky, and burning reeds to ash to stop the floods. Heard only through narration, they easily blur together.
We paired each step with something concrete: five colored stones floating in the air, a vortex of flame, flowing five-colored lava, a stream of light across the crack, four golden pillars, and blue reed ash.The same five colors carry through from the stones to the clouds, so viewers can link the materials, process and result.
Five beams of colored light fall, the camera pulls back, and the whole sky is filled with five-colored clouds.
For the pillars holding up the sky, we tried solid stone columns and glowing energy pillars before choosing the glowing version: four pillars standing in the sea of clouds, so one upward glance shows what “holding up the sky” means.
03
In the earliest image-generation script, Gonggong's opponent was Zhurong, the god of fire. When finalizing, we checked the original textbook text and changed the narration to “Gonggong, god of water, and Zhuanxu fought over the throne,” while keeping the blue-versus-red contrast on screen: Gonggong covered in water, his opponent standing in fire.
The contrasting colors of water and fire let viewers tell the two sides apart without reading the subtitles.
For the ending, following the line “people remembered Nüwa for generations,” we added a set of shots of Nüwa's statue: first an overhead view of the white statue on the summit, then a low-angle shot from its feet, and finally auspicious clouds and phoenixes. The story sets out from the gold of the opening and returns to a bright world.
04
Like “Kuafu Chases the Sun” and “Jingwei Fills the Sea,” “Nüwa Mends the Sky” is one of the program's mythological stories. We made nine AI story films in total for “Exploring China Through Idioms,” all aired on CCTV-1.
It shows one thing: AI can produce huge spectacle, but the bigger the spectacle, the more you need to set the rules in advance. Set the color phases first, then give each plot point something visible, and even a myth of more than two minutes can be told clearly. The same method works for tourism showcase films, science animations, brand launch openers and other films that need spectacle while still explaining something clearly.
FAQ
Set color phases for the whole film first. This film opens in gold, uses dark purple and a blue-versus-orange clash of water and fire for the disaster, and multicolor after the sky is mended. Before generating each shot, we decided which phase it belonged to, so viewers can tell from the colors where the story is.
We follow the original text. The source for this film came from the national fourth-grade Chinese textbook (Volume 1), and we kept the original plot when rewriting it as narration with one line per screen; the opponent written as Zhurong, god of fire, in the earliest script was changed to Zhuanxu according to the original text when finalizing. The production team received a version with voiceover and subtitles so experts could check it line by line.
Yes. The key is to tie each spectacle to a plot point. This film uses five-colored stones, a vortex of flame, five-colored lava, a stream of light and four glowing pillars to show the materials, smelting, repair and holding up of the sky, advancing step by step with the narration.
The finished film is about two minutes long, broken down from the narration into dozens of shots, with one to several shots per line. Image generation began in late November 2024, the rough cut came in December, the film was finalized in January 2025, and it aired with the program in February.
Approach
We first divided the story into four chapters (peace, catastrophe, repair and rebirth), then turned the script into the characters, actions, shot sizes and lighting for each shot. Consecutive shots are linked by cause and effect, rather than one big scene cutting abruptly to another.
The characters and the five-colored stones stay at the center of the story, while the contrast of water and fire, the pillars reaching the sky and the blue reed ash convey the conflict, the holding up of the sky and the stopping of the floods. Changes in texture, from crystal to molten stone to cloud, all revolve around the five colors: the effects are grounded in the content, not there to show off.
The shots of gathering stones, smelting, mending the sky and rebirth are linked by cause and effect: stones gathering, molten stone flowing and the sky being repaired show what was done and what came of it, and the changes in characters and setting after the disaster bring the emotion to a calm landing.
More Work
Ideal for brand launches · public-sector communications · cultural-tourism campaigns · IP transformation · event openers · earnings visualization · social campaigns · AI workflow development
