On Air and On Brand

Maker Space 113 did not look like a classroom. It looked like a shop that had been turned inside out: a wall of soft studio light, a camera on a tripod, and behind it all a green screen waiting to become anywhere in the world. Shelves of gift boxes stood ready to be sold, and this morning we were the ones doing the selling.

The course was called Cross-border E-commerce Live-Streaming, and it was an experience course in the truest sense: you learned it by standing on the mark and starting to talk. Our teachers walked us through how a livestream sale actually runs, from the first hello to the product held up close, then handed the studio over to us.

Three, Two, One, You're On

Presenting to a live camera is harder than it looks and more fun than we expected. The green screen means you cannot lean on your surroundings; it is just you, the product, and the little red light. We took turns pitching the gift boxes, learning to slow down, to hold an item at the right height, to talk to the lens as if it were a friend on the other side.

One of us held up a plush toy to the camera and could not stop grinning, and honestly neither could the rest of us. Somewhere between the nerves and the laughter, we understood the job differently: a livestream is not really about the product on the shelf, it is about being genuinely, warmly there for whoever is watching.

The Afternoon Turns to AI

After lunch we crossed to Classroom 304 in the 9th Teaching Building for a course on AI Marketing and Brand Visual Design. If the morning had asked us to be the face of a brand, the afternoon asked a bigger question: what happens when a machine can help design that face? The room was bright and modern, and the instructor at the front made the tools feel less like magic and more like a new kind of brush.

We watched a brief become an image in front of us: a few lines of description, and a brand's visual world starting to take shape on the screen. For students who had spent the morning selling products by hand, it was a striking flip of perspective. The same afternoon that taught us how brands are marketed also showed us how quickly the making of them is changing.

A Phoenix Made of Prompts

By the end of the session the screens around the room were full of images we had coaxed into being. One that stayed with us was a phoenix in bright armour, wreathed in flowers, its colours louder than anything we could have painted by hand. It was equal parts Lingnan pattern-making and pure imagination, and it had come from a sentence.

We ended day ten a little dizzy in the best way. In one day we had stood in front of the camera and behind the prompt, learned to sell warmth in real time and to conjure a brand's face out of words. Guangzhou keeps teaching us the same lesson in new clothes: the future of this trade is already here, and it still runs on people.