Singapore Studio's AI Short Film Reimagines NDP Under Zombie Attack — Out Aug 9
Source: The Straits Times
Singapore's National Day has its rituals — the parade, the fireworks, the flag fly-past — and AI now has a stake in them. On Aug 9, a Singapore studio will release an AI-assisted short film in which the National Day Parade comes under attack by a lethal spore pathogen that turns people into zombie-like...
Singapore's National Day has its rituals — the parade, the fireworks, the flag fly-past — and AI now has a stake in them. On Aug 9, a Singapore studio will release an AI-assisted short film in which the National Day Parade comes under attack by a lethal spore pathogen that turns people into zombie-like creatures. The four-minute film, titled Bersama Majulah — "Together Onwards" in Malay — is set in the fictional country Lionara, but its visuals are unmistakably local: the Marina Bay skyline, the Merlion, familiar parade-ground settings.
The film is the work of Edenstone, the Singapore-based studio behind the AI animation microdrama series Spore Fall, which debuted in March and follows a soldier and a medic struggling to survive the same outbreak. Bersama Majulah is helmed by Singaporean showrunner Joel Boh, with executive producer Chan Gin Kai — who produced the Golden Horse-winning animated feature Another World in 2025 — and an original theme song by local musician Dharma Sadasivan. It premieres on sporefall.com on National Day itself.
The creators are bracing for backlash, and they know exactly why. AI-generated entertainment is under global scrutiny: in China, the AI microdrama The Peach Blossom Hairpin was taken down after models and influencers accused the creators of using their faces without consent, prompting regulators to mandate explicit labels and digital watermarks on AI content from Sept 1, while Hollywood guilds have written strict rules around AI and likenesses. Edenstone's answer is a "human-written, AI-realised" positioning: humans write the narrative, scripts, characters and emotional arcs, while AI is deployed strictly under human creative direction to accelerate the production of visual assets.
"Some have asked why we would show a dystopian Singapore on National Day. We believe this is the ultimate act of faith," Boh said in a statement. "We have faith that the Singapore identity is not fragile — it is strong enough to be reimagined and reinvented." Whether audiences agree is itself a test case for how far AI-assisted storytelling can go in a market that has been slow to embrace AI-generated content.
Why it matters for Singapore: The film lands at the intersection of two trends the country is actively courting: a creative economy trying to scale production, and an AI ecosystem hunting for homegrown use cases beyond enterprise software. Edenstone's bet — that transparency about AI use, plus human authorship of story, is enough to win over audiences — will be watched by every local studio weighing whether AI tools are a production shortcut or a reputational risk. Releasing the argument on National Day makes the conversation impossible to ignore.
