Bas Moonen, Visual Effects Supervisor and Founder of Ambassadors Berlin

Every agency, production company and brand we talk to is already working with AI in some form. The budgets are tighter than they were, the timelines are shorter, and nobody wants to ‘fall behind’. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of the controversy either.

Challenges

I’d like to mention three main challenges that our industry is facing adopting AI.

The first challenge is knowing when and why to choose AI: it should elevate the craft. This starts at the first concept. Brands and agencies already acknowledge the potential, or need, of AI from the first brief they send out. But often it’s treated purely as a cost saver. This way, we miss out on all the creative potential.

The second is what I’d call the AI slop look. This is about the execution. Often this means avoiding the telltale signs of AI that saturate our social feeds these days. VFX plays a big role employing many hybrid techniques. But I don’t think ‘hiding’ AI should always be the answer either. The viewer will appreciate an original aesthetic, even if it’s coming from AI, as long as it's created in the right way and for the right reasons.

The third challenge is shaping AI to meet the brief. AI is excellent at getting what seems like near perfect results. This often leads to unrealistic expectations of the process/end result. But controlling every detail, that’s a whole different beast. The AI workflows that do this get technical very fast. Straight forward, iterative workflows on images will quickly degenerate quality. You can roll the dice by prompting the same animation over and over again, but it’ll never hit the spot.

Indeed: A new workflow in practice

For Indeed's latest campaign, Serviceplan clearly understood when and why to use AI. Four comedic films, each set in a different fantastical world that only AI could bring to life.

Tempomedia asked us to come up with an approach that didn’t treat AI as a compromise, but as a creative advantage. The core idea of our pitch was that the acting had to be done by real actors. Nuanced performance lives in micro-expressions. Especially Ingrid, who has been the familiar face of Indeed for many years. The slightest deviation from her performance and everything would fall apart.

To pitch our take, we captured the challenges and opportunities in a proof of concept: one shot of three neanderthals in conversation riding a mammoth. The shot required a combination of real world and AI elements seamlessly blended.

We needed to find a hybrid approach for both the look and the animation. We needed the actors' likeness, but the lighting and integration of an AI world. We needed their performance to deliver the lines, while their bodies moved in sync with the mammoths slow walking gait at the same time.

Together with Alex Feil we set up a digital film production pipeline mimicking traditional filmmaking. With our internal team and a network of artists we started to craft our worlds; designing sets, locations, wardrobe, character designs based on the actors, storyboards, we developed the cinematographic language. We worked very closely for months treating every detail with the same attention as one would in traditional film making. We were testing every shot. Preproduction converged into an intense week at our Berlin office with Alex, the Tempomedia production team and our artists all working together to get ready for the shoot.

The difference

At Ambassadors Berlin we’ve been working to find the best ways to make AI and VFX work together. Working in VFX for most of my life, I’ve always looked for ways to adopt new technologies in a creative way.

All three challenges I mentioned before were met in the Indeed campaign. The worlds were meticulously designed, the performances were real, and nothing was left to chance.

This level of control is what makes VFX more important than ever. Anyone can prompt something that looks almost right. It takes craft to make something stand out. This is what separates AI craft from AI slop.