Junie Lau Builds a Cantonese Cyberpunk World on Her Childhood Street

Junie Lau (@junielaux) spent years as a production designer on commercials and music videos. She designed the sets and props. The budgets kept limiting what she could put on screen.

"As a director and production designer for several years, I have frequently encountered limitations in material resources and budget constraints when translating the surreal visuals from my imagination to the screen in traditional filmmaking," she told The Sweetshop in a 2024 Q&A.

AI took that limit away. She put it simply to Forbes this September: "With AI, I realized that I could become the director."

Much of her work is made with or for the companies that build the tools, including Google, OpenAI and ByteDance, and she says so on her own site. Her current project is her own. Goldfish Mayhem is a kung fu comedy set on a version of the street below her childhood home. So far only the trailer is out.

Before AI: production design

Lau grew up in Foshan, in southern China near Hong Kong. Her first language is Cantonese, she said in a Civitai Creator Session in 2024.

She studied fashion design. In 2018 she moved to London for a master's at the University of the Arts London, and started trying out VR, AR and early AI there. In 2020 she went back to China and worked on commercials and music videos for big brands and celebrities.

Forbes reported that directing jobs were hard to get then, and that Lau named gender as one of the main reasons. Production design was the job that kept her close to directing. She started making AI images in early 2022, when that could still mean writing code.

The Court: a Peter Gabriel video she made alone

The break came from a contest. In 2023 Peter Gabriel and Stability AI ran a contest called #DiffuseTogether. Lau entered with a video for The Court, a song from his album i/o. Forbes reported she picked the contest over a commercial job she had lined up.

She made it in one to two weeks, she told Civitai: "I just did everything by myself." She used early AI image tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, plus ChatGPT.

It won joint first prize and became the song's official video. Gabriel wrote in the video's description, "I hadn't seen anything like it before." Lau told Forbes, "I think my life was kind of changed at that moment."

Her first film mixing a real shoot with AI

The Court brought more music video work. A media company also paid for her next short film, she told Civitai.

That film was e^(iπ)+1=0, made at the end of 2023. It was, she said, the first time "I tried to combine live action with AI," and it took a full crew. A retired mathematician becomes the god of his own digital comic, and three AI characters try to find the edge of his world.

This is where the production designer shows. She shot the real world as clean live action. For the digital world she used an early technique that builds 3D scenes from ordinary video, which looked blurry and grainy at the time, she told The Sweetshop. AI also helped her design some of the real props on set.

It won Silver at Runway's AI Film Festival in 2024 and screened at Tribeca. Civitai asked if she'd fix the flicker now that the tools are steadier. She said no: "I like the texture at that time."

Dear "Stranger," made with Google

The Google film is Dear "Stranger," made with Flow, Google's AI filmmaking app. It premiered at Google I/O 2025 and screened at Tribeca. A grandmother and grandchild meet across parallel worlds. Forbes reported that Lau's grandmother paid for her studies in the UK and died before the Peter Gabriel win.

Her director's statement, in the film's YouTube description, comes back to budgets: "AI became the key, unlocking the traditional constraints of resources and budget, allowing me to sculpt a pure, intimate vision into being."

Goldfish Mayhem: the street she grew up on

Goldfish Mayhem is part of a series of short films from Wonder Studios. Wonder's Instagram post says she drew on "her upbringing in Foshan, Hong Kong cinema and Cantonese street culture."

Forbes reported that Goldfish Street is based on a real street just downstairs from her childhood home. Her mother took her to a martial arts school at 8, and she grew up watching Stephen Chow comedies with family. She told Forbes she felt few kung fu films put a woman at the center.

Three girls, BOBO, FENG SHUI GIRL and LITTLE ONE, cross into a digital world above their street to save the woman who raised them. Lau has been introducing them one at a time on Instagram. BOBO sells fishballs and is heir to a kung fu school. Her character post is mostly about her gear: "Her robotic arm was built to make fishballs; her curry fishball cannon ensures that anyone threatening the neighbours receives a hot meal at considerable speed."

The trailer is full of set dressing. Lion dancers balance on poles above old apartment blocks. A market stall's plastic tubs fly past a shopkeeper. One room is hung floor to ceiling with charms and lanterns.

How she made the kung fu scenes

The fights start with people. "It starts with real martial artists," Lau wrote in a behind-the-scenes post in October. She worked with choreographer Mr Zhang and his team on Southern Chinese kung fu.

They filmed the fighters. Then they fed that footage, plus depth maps (images that record how far each part of the frame is from the camera), into Seedance, ByteDance's AI video tool. In her words: "We filmed their movements, then used depth maps and the live-action footage as video references in Seedance 2.5 to bring that choreography to life through our leading star, BOBO." It's a popular tool: four other creators we've covered use it, each through a different app.

Forbes reported she wants to mix the weight of real martial arts with AI movement that can ignore physics. "When everyone could make pretty images, then the meaning behind it becomes unique," she told the magazine.

MADAM P!NK and what's next

MADAM P!NK is her other original world this year. It premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June. In its future, women's emotions are strong enough to disrupt gravity, the government compresses them into fuel, and a demoted police officer named EDEN fights back. She's been posting scenes from it, including an action sequence she made with Seedance in March.

Her longer films are on her YouTube channel, and she's also @JunieLauX on X. Goldfish Mayhem has only its trailer out. Her October post says the film is coming soon.