十点十分 Ten Past Ten

"Ten Past Ten" is a 45-second AI-generated Republican-era mystery short drama. In 1930s Shanghai, three men die one after another at the Paramount ballroom, their pocket watches all stopped at ten past ten; the detective chasing the truth finds he is the last name on the list. For narrative, the first 3 seconds use a gunshot and the line "that's the third one" to set the hook of a serial murder, then the watches frozen at the same moment shift the suspense from "who is the killer" to "why ten past ten." The reversal rests on three planted clues: the white gloves the heroine never removes, the lead's pause as he checks his watch, and the cup of tea she offers. In production, this is the second run of my self-built AI short-drama workflow: I first built standardized character sheets, then split the script into three 15-second time-coded prompt segments. Each segment opens with a fixed reference image and the previous segment's last frame to anchor the characters and keep cross-segment consistency; the style layer was tuned to a dark, filmic Republican-era texture, constraining period details and performance quality.