A chance encounter on the subway is enough to set off a search through ancient landscapes, Wild West towns, rainforests and futuristic worlds. In the short film Cosmic True Heart, China Mobile and F5 Shanghai turn a phone service interruption into a journey through parallel dimensions, all in an attempt to re-establish a lost connection.
The story begins with an encounter between two strangers on the subway. After the young man’s phone service is interrupted, he loses the ability to contact the girl he has just met. His search then leaves everyday reality behind and takes him through a series of completely different worlds, where he repeatedly tries to find a way to reconnect with her.
The campaign was created for Qixi Festival, whose traditional story is based on the myth of two lovers separated by the Milky Way who can reunite only once a year. F5 Shanghai brings this motif of physical separation into modern life, where a missed call, an unstable signal or a moment without connection can be enough for people to lose touch with one another.
That is why the journey ends only in the “10086th dimension”, when the story returns to the real world. The call then goes through thanks to China Mobile 10086 customer service, after which the protagonist heads to the next station and finds the girl again. The dimension number thus directly connects the film’s story with the 10086 platform and the promise of customer support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Instead of the usual romantic approach to festival communication, the campaign is built around the broader sense of unease that arises when we lose the ability to reach someone important to us. Adams Fan, Chief Creative Officer at F5 Shanghai, describes the campaign idea as an attempt to place the connection between a signal and real human relationships at the center of the story, while Jimyi Xu, the agency’s Marketing Director, highlights the parallel between mythical separation by a galaxy and today’s digital disconnection.
Cosmic True Heart is also entirely generated using AI. Different visual styles take the story from ancient landscapes and Wild West towns to rainforests and futuristic worlds, following the idea of a journey through 10,086 dimensions. AI was therefore used not only as a production tool, but also as part of the creative execution that enables constant transitions between completely different worlds until the moment when a single call re-establishes the lost connection.
