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Group745
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Group745
Creative in association withGear Seven
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A Donkey Shares His Festive Wish in World's First AI Crafted Christmas Ad

07/12/2022
Digital Agency
London, UK
822
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Digital innovation agency Rehab has created a festive ad exclusively using AI tools

Digital innovation agency Rehab has created the world’s first Christmas advert solely leveraging AI tools end-to-end.

The 129 second film, which tells the story of a donkey who wants to be a reindeer, was generated using a myriad of cutting-edge AI tools that produced everything from storylines and scripts to final visual assets and audio. 

Devised as part of Rehab’s regular Hackweeks, which challenge its multidisciplinary team to experiment and innovate using the latest in emerging technology, the piece took just five days to complete from start to finish.

What’s more, some of the team that produced the advert hadn’t used any of the AI platforms before, so learning how they work was part of the creative process.

The team - which was made up of product strategists, designers and innovators - started by giving an AI the ‘persona’ of a creative director who specialises in making Christmas adverts, before briefing it to devise festive scripts.

The eventual storyline charts the story of a donkey called Bob who wants to be a reindeer, and is brought to life via a computer-generated narration to accompany the AI-generated imagery and audio.

The creative process broken down:

Rehab prompted OpenAI’s GPT-3 into thinking it was a creative director that specialises in Christmas ads, and got it to generate various scripts. The chosen script came out in one (i.e. the final piece wasn’t a compilation of various AI scripts).

The script was fed into text-to-image generators Midjourney and Dalle-2 to create storyboards for the piece. Midjourney produced results with the best visuals, with Dalle-2 used to edit and refine images produced by Midjourney. The team replaced and erased aspects until they were happy. 

Replica Studios was used to create a more human tone for the advert’s narration, while Soundraw contributed the orchestral arrangement, which sits beneath the voiceover.

Kerry Wilson, managing director of Rehab, said, “We’re delighted to launch our AI-generated Christmas advert, which if nothing else promises to set creative tongues wagging this Christmas.

“AI is already making its impact felt within creative industries, so we wanted to see the extent to which it can be called upon to handle the end-to-end creation of a festive advert.

“Currently, there isn’t an AI silver bullet for making adverts - the team blended a variety of tools and platforms in order to get to the finished article, keeping a close eye on the outputs throughout the process.

“There was still a fair amount of human input required, mainly in refining the visuals which were generated from the script. But this process was still much quicker than if a human illustrator was briefed to bring the storyline to life by hand. With Google and Meta both reportedly working on text-to-video AI software, it’s possible that there could be even fewer rungs to the process in the future.

“It’s clear that AI holds the power to speed up the ideation and storyboarding process - once we’d given GPT-3 its creative director persona, it was quick to provide scripts which were on the right lines.

“Through the process, we also noted that AI had limitations when it came to its understanding of IP law - many of the early scripts borrowed heavily from Christmas movies, which obviously wouldn’t pass without obtaining usage rights!

“It’s also worth noting that most of the team who worked on the project had never used any of the tools before, so learning the ropes was part of the five day process too - it would be even quicker if they were to attempt to make an advert from scratch again.

“In the very near future, we anticipate that creative teams will turn to AI where it enhances the creative process, but I’m pleased to say that for now at least, humans are still an intrinsic part of that process. We will certainly be using learnings to improve our ways of working and create better solutions for our clients. 

“Above all, we’ve shown what AI can do in 2022 - we were pretty impressed with the finished video, especially as it was achieved in the fraction of the time it would take an entirely human team to do the same thing.”

Rehab is a digital innovation agency that leverages emerging technology to create growth opportunities for brands.

Working with Marketing, Product and C-suite who for over 18 years have trusted them to create new products and services that generate new revenue, users, and data.

Credits
Work from rehab studio
Bob the Reindeer
Rehab
07/12/2022
144
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