Where Memory Ends — Haochen(Jimmy) Xu

Haochen(Jimmy) Xu

jimmyhcx@gmail.com
@jimmyhcx
/in/jimmyhcx

Unreal Director · Cinematic Environment Designer

Bridging storytelling, space, and atmosphere through real-time worldbuilding.

With a foundation in architecture, I build immersive visual environments where narrative design, spatial composition, and atmospheric cues work together to shape perception and emotion.

My practice integrates layout, shot design, and virtual camera work to translate narrative mood into spatial experience.

I aim to contribute to cinematic worldbuilding across film, games, and virtual production—while continuing to explore how digital space shapes memory, perception, and experience.

Focus & Research Interests

Spatial storytelling, real-time cinematic environments, digital memory,
atmospheric worldbuilding, perception, and object agency in virtual space.

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WHERE MEMORY ENDS

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WHERE MEMORY ENDS
Unreal Short Film

Director/Environment Designer
Apr 2025-Sep 2025
Film currently in festival submissions — contact for private viewing.

Story

DESCRIPTION

Where Memory Ends is a short film created in Unreal Engine, told through the perspective of an Alzheimer’s patient on his final journey as life flashes before his eyes. It traces a passage through nostalgia, comfort, and loss—culminating in a moment of eternal sun.

When a person forgets everything, even their own reflection, how do they remember a life? This film began with my question of whether spaces can carry fragments of a person. When self-awareness fades, does inhabiting and touching places allow those places to inherit a trace of one’s soul? As death approaches, perhaps what we remember is not only the person, but also the world they touched and shaped.

In “Where Memory Ends,” I build spaces as vessels of memory and cultural identity. Passing through rooms of childhood, adulthood, and old age, I sought to weave together fragments of personal history with ghosts of the past. For me, the film is not only about Alzheimer’s. It is also about searching for belonging within forgetting, an attempt to accept forgetting not as loss, but as another way of being. Although it is hard, being endures even as memory dissolves, and within that endurance lies the courage to say: it’s OK to forget.