Synopsis

In a future where filters determine class, Ian lives bare-faced. When a system crash — the “Un-rendering” — strips every filter, she alone stays unchanged and becomes an overnight icon. Once the system reboots, the world starts consuming her bare face in an entirely different way.

Director's Comment

My primary directorial focus for [The Raw] was finding the precise visual language to capture the suffocating artificiality of a world where the synthetic has fully consumed the authentic. To achieve this, I made a deliberate choice not to fight the technical limitations of generative AI, but to weaponize them. The inherent "uncanny valley" effect—characterized by poreless, overly smooth skin textures and eerie, synchronized micro-movements of the AI-generated crowds—became our most powerful narrative tool, visually embodying the chilling uniformity of a society obsessed with artificial perfection.

I structured the entire visual landscape on a harsh, violent contrast between this hyper-rendered, plastic environment and the raw, unpolished face of our protagonist, Ian. Through this stark juxtaposition of texture and light, I wanted the audience to physically feel Ian's visceral emotional isolation. By transforming technological artifacts into a thematic device, The Raw transcends mere technical showcase, using the medium itself to confront the audience with a chilling question: What becomes of our humanity when our very essence is reduced to marketable data?

Staff

Producer OH Kyunghyun 

Scenario KIM Gahyeon 

Storyboard/Character Design/BG Design/Lay Out/Effect LEE Gwangyeol 

Animation LEE Gwangyeol, MOON Sunwook 

Editing LEE Gwangyeol 

Sound YOO Jiseung 

Music Suno AI

Voice ElevenLabs (AI)

Program Note

In an age flooded with generative AI, this is a clever film that goes beyond treating the technology as a mere tool, folding AI's very nature as a medium into the substance of its story. In a near future dominated by virtual filter masks, the protagonist's struggle to reject the ""perfection"" of appearance that society demands intersects, ironically, with the director's own choice to generate the entire process using AI. Through the system's collapse, its restoration, and the commercialization that follows, the film sharply dissects a contemporary mass psychology that turns even individuality into a commodity. Wearing the skin of technology to indict technology's very nature, this aesthetically self-aware narrative takes on the difficult question of how to define human uniqueness in the age of AI, casting a weighty light on the portrait of a modern person lost at the border between technology and humanity.

Jinny Hyejin CHOO