- Tool, a production company at the forefront of integrating AI into the traditional production pipeline, has rolled out a new experimental spot that offers a powerful proof of concept.
- The new experimental film, which focuses on the Land Rover Defender, is co-directed by Ben Tricklebank & Tool-founder Erich Joiner.
- And while the spot was developed to experiment with new AI capabilities, it’s centered on what’s always been at the heart of successful advertising – a great creative idea & brand storytelling.
- The :45 experimental film, “Who Says Cars Can’t Dream,” features the Land Rover Defender and its adventurous nature in a fun and playful way.
- The directors wrote a script about a Defender that is tired of its suburban, monotonous life, wondering … “what if?” a car can dream? Where would it want to go? What would it do?
- This Defender “lives” in a major metropolitan area, goes to and from work, manages grocery runs, drives to restaurants and very capably handles all the other everyday life activities it’s owner requires.
- But what it really wants is to unleash its inner adventure. To run free. To go off-roading, to the mountains, driving through mud and snow.
About the project:
- Tool has been at the heart of two of the industry’s most discussed early AI-meets-production projects, most notably Under Armour’s “Forever is Made Now” and Starburst’s “Different Every Time”
- Their team has also been traveling the country meeting with brands and agencies about how they can leverage AI in their marketing programs.
- This new film was developed to explore several of the most commonly asked questions from those conversations:
- “How can we apply AI to our commercial content production process?”
- “Can AI deliver high-quality brand storytelling and fidelity?”
- “Will AI allow us to be more efficient?”
- Rather than rushing out to create everything using only AI, Tool took an approach that would use AI to provide a production solution for specific portions of the spot that they felt it could deliver to the standards brands expect with commercial content.
About the process:
- Tool started by looking at what AI and Live-Action do well. GenAI platforms like Runway, Kling and Midjourney have gotten to a place where users can generate photo-real images and add realistic motion to them.
- Where GenAI video is not strong is with human performance and consistency of a moving product (e.g., a car).
- Taking this into account, Tool wanted to produce a car commercial that borrowed production techniques from each, while allowing themselves to create a spot that would maintain the level of brand storytelling and fidelity that a major brand would be happy with.
- The team shot for one day – they estimate this production would have taken several additional days of shooting if they had taken the traditional route.
- On the day of the shoot, Tool focused on telling the parts of the story that they didn’t feel that AI can currently achieve – human performance and capturing the Defender in motion.
- Taking a hybrid approach allowed Tool to use the best of what Live-Action and AI allows for in creating commercial content. This approach allowed Tool to take a 1 day shoot and mix the footage with an AI approach that Tool used to generate all of the driving footage. This gave them a larger range of location and weather conditions that didn’t require travel and extensive VFX.
- The process rolled out as follows: generating imagery, creating a photo-real Defender, adding motion to the imagery, upscaling the content, and versioning & personalizing the spots. In total, AI generated content made up about 50% of the visuals used in the final spot.
- To take a deeper look at the creative & production process, check out this page.
