Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s 1956 sci-fi short story “The Last Question”, director Moises Arancibia and the motion team at Smog in Santiago, Chile, transform a cancelled client project into a thoughtful ode to creative evolution.

Moises Arancibia: “A year ago, we started a project that involved presenting the evolution of humankind. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was canceled. However, we were very proud of the style frames we designed for the initial sequence, so we decided to animate it and use it as a promotional piece for our Instagram. We did it, but we never published it.

“Later on, my partner Pablo and I were working on what would become the new SMOG reel, under the concept ‘We don’t know what we are doing’. This concept explored our creative process as a design studio and how we felt about the rise of AI in our field. But other projects came along, and we gradually abandoned it.
 

“This film addresses our own creative evolution, our process as designers, as artists, as humans, as intelligent beings who today, in the midst of the development of Artificial Intelligence, must take a stance and decide the origin of our creative energy and what we do with it.”

 
“One day, while testing a demo of an AI app, I used one of the style frames from the reel to see what could be created from that input. Specifically, it featured the large words “WE DO NOT KNOW” with a character floating in the center. The result was disastrous: it kept the central ‘O’ and turned the rest into nothing but noise particles (this frame is now part of the short film).

“That’s when the joke emerged that the AI had become ‘too creative’. When I shared this with one of our team members, he mentioned Isaac Asimov’s story ‘The Last Question’, and suddenly everything clicked. I realized I could bring all these pieces together into a single narrative.

“This film addresses our own creative evolution, our process as designers, as artists, as humans, as intelligent beings who today, in the midst of the development of Artificial Intelligence, must take a stance and decide the origin of our creative energy and what we do with it.”
 
 

 
Production SMOG
Director: Moises Arancibia
Creative Director: Moises Arancibia, Pablo Gonzalez
Design: Abigail Maldonado, Sebastian Cifuentes, Sebastian Pinto, Moises Arancibia.
Animation: Alexis Lagos, Ignacio Meneses, Eduardo Garcia, Xavier Arancibia, Sebastian Platz, Catalina Borquez, Moises Arancibia, Bernardita Bruner, Marcelo Medel, Tamy.

Audio: Moises Arancibia
Mix: Clio