The Mexico City edition of the OFFF festival opened last week with these exuberant titles from director Itay Tevel and the Hornet crew who use the sequence to weave an abstract narrative of how human and AI creativity can coexist.

From Hornet: “OFFF Mexico centers on technology, creativity and motion design. So for this year’s main titles and visual design, director Itay Tevel knew we couldn’t talk about technology in the creative field without mentioning AI. So he decided that our work would revolve around this dance between human creativity and AI tools.

“The narrative begins where we see humans and AI coexisting in harmony, and almost mirroring a parent-child relationship. To create a visual distinction between human and AI, we used warm colors to represent humans, emphasizing their creativity, and emotional depth. For AI, we used blues and silvers to convey logic, precision, and technological advancement.

“Early in the story, humans feed AI with information, much like a parent feeds the child with food and also information about their own world, their reality, and their psychology. The child ends up looking a lot like the parent in many ways, but as AI grows, it starts to learn and develop its own ideas, same as the child.
 

“We trained AI on our own models and designs and let it generate more images. We selected the images we liked, put it into a program called AI Instant Mesh, and then we took it back into Cinema 4D to refine the model and change the textures and colors by hand.”

 
“As in many relationships, tension arises. We portrayed this visually as both the human and AI start to restrict each other and take more and more space in the frame. The tension keeps building and building until it snaps and chaos erupts.

“This chaos represents the struggle for control and the need for balance. From that moment forward, humans and AI understand that they have to co-exist hand in hand, which leads us to the symbiotic scenes. These half AI, half human shapes became the branding for the event.

“In terms of the production process, the team expanded on some of Itay’s prior experiments of converting 2D objects to 3D and integrating AI tools into the process. We began by animating in 2D, while simultaneously creating realistic 3D style frames.

“We trained AI on our own models and designs and let it generate more images. We selected the images we liked, put it into a program called AI Instant Mesh, and then we took it back into Cinema 4D to refine the model and change the textures and colors by hand. We also asked chatGPT to create expressions that allowed for some of the pixel animation.

“Software is advancing faster than ever, making it easier for people to create. But just because everyone has a camera in their pocket, doesn’t make everyone an award-winning photographer. Many of the explorations for this project relied on skilled collaboration using between two and six different software tools.

“Ultimately, it’s our creativity, storytelling, and ability to evoke emotions that truly define us as humans. It’s about how we communicate ideas, give feedback, and curate our work that makes us unique. Technology provides us with really exciting tools to share our ideas and visions but tools come and go, creativity is what matters.”
 
 

 
Client: OFFFMX

Production: Hornet
Director: Itay Tevel
EP: Cathy Kwan
Senior Producer: Justine Webster
Editor: Minseok Kim
2D Design Lead: Kyuri Kim
3D Design Lead: Anil Rinat
Motion Lead: Thiago Steka
Concept Exploration: Jeroen Krielaars
Storyboard Artist: Josh Edwards
Motion Designer: Seongjin Yoon, Amalia Lage, Joanne Jian, Kelsey Robinson, Erico Santana
CG Generalist: Dor Sagiv, Daniel Whitaker, Nachei Sanchez
Production Coordinator: Ryann Rezza

Music/sound design: Pelican Sound