Shanghai
Lian is a 3D animated trailer project that explores a speculative dystopian world through cinematic storytelling, environment design, and character-driven worldbuilding.
Set in a city divided between the industrial Lower City and the technologically advanced Upper City, the project follows Lian, a young programmer who discovers that the seemingly perfect society above is built upon a hidden reality of control and decay.
After discovering a mysterious glowing lotus key left behind by her mother, a former architect of the city's ruling system, Lian infiltrates the Upper City during the annual Harmony Festival. As she uncovers the truth behind the city's artificial utopia, she discovers a hidden mechanism designed to challenge the system itself.
Through the visual language of neon dystopias, holographic architecture, and collapsing digital environments, Lian examines themes of constructed realities, technological control, and the relationship between individuals and the systems that shape their world.
The project began as an exploration of how visual environments can communicate social structures and hidden narratives.
Rather than treating the city as a simple background, I designed the environment as an active storytelling element. The contrast between the industrial Lower City and the artificial perfection of the Upper City reflects the social hierarchy embedded within the world.
The visual design explores questions such as:
• How can architecture reveal the values and power structures of a society?
• How can speculative environments communicate invisible systems of control?
• How can a fictional world create emotional understanding before the story is explicitly explained?
The world of Lian is structured around two contrasting environments:
A dense industrial district shaped by scarcity, labor, and outdated infrastructure. The environment uses mechanical structures, compressed spaces, and layered urban elements to represent a society built around survival.
A technologically advanced city presented as a perfect utopia. However, beneath its polished surfaces and holographic displays lies a controlled environment designed to maintain an illusion of harmony.
The visual contrast between these spaces establishes the central conflict of the narrative: the difference between the world people see and the systems that actually govern their lives.
The project focused on creating a cinematic visual experience through:
• 3D environment modeling
• Character and prop design
• Lighting and atmosphere development
• Camera composition and cinematic storytelling
• Animation and trailer editing
The design language combines futuristic architecture, cyberpunk-inspired environments, and symbolic visual elements such as the glowing lotus key, which represents both inherited knowledge and the possibility of transformation.
The trailer uses a fragmented reveal structure, introducing the audience to the world through visual clues rather than direct explanation.
Instead of immediately revealing the city's hidden reality, the narrative gradually builds tension through:
• Environmental contrasts
• Symbolic objects
• Character motivation
• The transformation of the city itself
The project explores how audiences construct an understanding of fictional worlds through limited information — an idea that connects to my broader interest in interactive storytelling and how people interpret worlds created through designed systems.
Software
Autodesk Maya
Blender
Substance Painter
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Focus Areas
3D Modeling
Environment Design
Worldbuilding
Visual Storytelling
Animation
Cinematic Composition
Lian represents an early exploration of worldbuilding as a method of storytelling — creating environments where social systems, histories, and hidden narratives are embedded into the world itself.
This project informed my later interest in generative world creation: how worlds are constructed, what assumptions are embedded within them, and how audiences interpret meaning from environments they did not entirely author.
While Lian explores a world created by a designer, my current research extends this question toward generative systems:
When a world is no longer fully designed by a human, but partially created through interaction with an intelligent system, how do we understand authorship, ownership, and meaning?
