Jiaze Li (DiDi_OK) and "Website": how the AI short that won two awards in Venice was made

On September 6, 2026, an 11-minute science-fiction short called Website won two prizes at the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice: the Reply AI Studios Grand Prix and the Community Award, which is voted by the public. Its maker is Jiaze Li, who posts on the Chinese video site Bilibili as DiDi_OK.

English coverage stopped at the award. Li has said a lot more in Chinese about how he works, what it costs and why he doesn’t call his films “pure AI”. This is what he has said, with the sources at the bottom.

The short version


Film	Website, 11 minutes, science fiction
Maker	Jiaze Li (DiDi_OK), born in the 1990s, from Zhengzhou, works at WPP in London
First shown	Bilibili, April 2026; 5.61 million views there by September
Awards	Reply AI Studios Grand Prix and Community Award, Reply AI Film Festival 2026
The field	More than 3,100 films from 76 countries; 10 finalists, 4 of them from China
Tools	Veo 3, Runway, Kling and Seedance 2, on top of 3D work and a hand-built website
Budget	About 50,000 yuan, roughly $7,000

One thing to get right: Website did not win the festival. The top prize went to A Face Only A Mother Could Love by the Canadian filmmaker Robert Gaudette. Website took the two other awards named above.

What the film is about

A mysterious platform broadcasts events from a parallel world, and the attention people pay to them starts to change what is real. Li has said the idea began with Punch, a baby monkey at a Japanese zoo whose story spread online; public attention did, in the end, make the animal’s life better. “I cried my eyes out,” he told the Chinese outlet Zi Niu News. “Every day I prayed things would go a little better for him.”

He did not want a straight-line story, so the film is built around a website the viewer moves through. In his words: “I was probably the only finalist who didn’t use AI alone.”

How it was made

Li trained as a 3D animator at the University of the Arts London and has spent about four years at WPP’s London office, where he now works as an AI director. He makes his own films at night.

For Website he combined three things:

3D production, the craft he trained in.
A virtual website, designed and built as part of the film.
Several AI video models, each for one job. According to Zi Niu News: Google’s Veo 3 for the long science-fiction shots, Runway for effects shots, Kling for scenes where characters interact, and ByteDance’s Seedance 2 to keep the picture consistent and control the pacing.

China News Service put the budget at about 50,000 yuan. Li’s summary of his own method is short: AI tools are one part of the process, and taste, story and content still decide the result.

The earlier film that made his name

Website was his second hit. In February 2026 he released The Sign (《牌子》), a seven-minute short about a world thrown into chaos by warning signs nobody can read. It passed 10 million views on Bilibili in a week, with more than 800,000 likes, and won the 1 million yuan first prize in Bilibili’s first AI creation contest, which drew more than 8,300 entries.

The Sign, playing from the maker’s own upload on Bilibili (in Chinese).

The numbers behind The Sign say more about how AI films get made than any tool list:

Two months in total: over a month on the script, then 23 days of generation and editing.
3,000 to 4,000 generations for one shot. A single 15-to-20-second shot at a crossroads took more than 1,000 batches of four.
1,500 music generations. He spent a full week on the score in Suno, after using Gemini to work out the cultural background of the sound he wanted.
A different model for each kind of shot. By his account: Nano Banana for still images, Veo for dialogue because the lips stay in sync, Kling for camera moves, Runway for physical effects.
No storyboard. He judges shots by feel and keeps only the ones he would score 80 or above.
Compositing, not one-click output. He turns generated footage into layers with transparency and assembles shots in post, the way a 3D artist would.

He keeps the look consistent with a few plain rules: realistic style, low saturation, and most characters appearing only once.

What other creators can take from it

Pick the model per shot. Neither film was made in one tool.
Expect to throw almost everything away. Thousands of generations for one shot is the cost of looking unlike AI.
Spend the time on the script. More than half of his schedule on The Sign went on writing.
Skills from before AI still count. The 3D and compositing work is what made Website stand out to the jury, and to Guo Fan, the director of The Wandering Earth, who has praised both films.

Li has also said he takes almost no commercial work on the side, to keep the films from bending toward what a client would want.

What he is making next

A project whose title translates as Garbage Station. He describes it as a fuller fictional world with fixed characters and a main storyline, built so that the audience can take part in shaping it.

Where to watch

Both films are on his Bilibili channel, DiDi_OK; The Sign is here. The Reply AI Film Festival lists the 2026 winners on its site. For the other Chinese winners, see our list of the best AI short films, award winners from China.

Sources

Quotes are our translations from the Chinese. Where sources disagreed, we used the figure given by more than one of them. We have not interviewed Li ourselves. If you made an AI short and want it listed, start here.