A Girl and Robot Explore a Gen-AI World in Animated Short

VCCP’s AI creative agency, has today released an animated short film, made using Gen-AI to celebrate its first birthday.

‘finding faith’ was created to explore the practical uses of generative video for brands today by adhering to a consistent brand world. The faith team decided on the project as a way of “demonstrating the craft it takes to control AI to meet our creative standards, instead of letting AI control how much we lowered them”.

faith chose to work with their own brand world with their characters ‘girl’ and ‘robot’ (representing humanity and Gen-AI) featuring in an animated origin story which illustrates their founding idea that Gen-AI, when used properly can serve as an accelerator of human creativity.

The story captures the moment a young girl overcomes her initial fear and takes a leap of faith in befriending a lost robot, an act that unlocks their combined potential. Inspired by anime films, everything from the script to storyboards, animation and music was created using AI tools. The small team behind the film combined more than 15 different tools in total to complete production in just four weeks - reducing costs by an estimated 85%.

Ben Hopkins and Morten Legarth, creative directors at faith, said, “The potential of generative video is much talked about and we’ve seen some great examples in fashion and music videos. They play well to the limitations of popular tools, but when it comes to creative control and consistency things get sketchy. Brands tend to require a more clearly defined narrative, distinct brand worlds and creative direction, which generative video tools have yet to provide.

“With ‘finding faith’ we decided to test the capabilities of emerging generative tools on our own brand, to see how far we could push the technology when integrated into a creative process. There were many challenges though, the pace of AI development saw new versions of tools with new capabilities constantly being released, meaning we had to adapt as we went along to take full advantage.

“This project would not have been possible without recent developments in Gen-AI, especially by the passionate open-source community - we wouldn’t have had the time, people or budget to pull this off even a year ago - but this serves as a great case study of what we can currently achieve.”

The film will be released on social channels today and is accompanied by a making of film which shares some of the lessons learned during the project.