To celebrate their first birthday, the team at AI creative agency faith used themselves as the guinea pig to explore practical uses of Gen-AI and test the tools’ abilities “to create films within a consistent brand world.”

The result, which no doubt will be both hard to watch and worrying for many traditional animators, is an anime-inspired tale of a girl and a robot (representing humanity and Gen-AI) where all assets including script, storyboards, animation, and music were created using a pallet of 15 AI tools on a production timeline of four weeks.

Regardless of how the quality of the animation stacks up against more classical 2D and 3D techniques, the film is a notable indicator of where AI tools are making inroads into creative production and just how fast those roads are being built.

According to the agency, mastering the AI pipeline “takes a lot of craft to control the chaos” but “when used properly, Gen-AI can serve as an accelerator of human creativity.”
 

“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.”

 
Ben Hopkins and Morten Legarth, CDs at faith: “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.

“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.”

Watch the making-of video:
 

 
 

 
Client: faith at VCCP

Agency: faith at VCCP
CEO: Michael Sugden
Chief Strategy Officer: Michael Lee
Head of Production: Alex Dalman
CD: Ben Hopkins, Morten Legarth
Innovation Director: Peter Gasston
Creative: Vicky David
Managing Partner: Kerry Howell
Business Director: Sam Whiston
Integrated Producer: Charlotte McCluskey
EP: Jake Hafer
Producer: Miriam Deas

Production: faith at VCCP
Director: Ed Roe
Assistant Director: Farihah Chowdhury
Research & Development: Rachael Hinge
Designer: Rohit Sharma, Miguel Silgado, Tom Widdrington

Post/VFX: faith at VCCP
Producer: Amira Petker, Elliott Watson
Editor: Amelia Eve: Adrian Scanlon, Mark Singer, Jess MacLeod
Color Grading: Syd Harvey
Project Manager: Ravi Patel
Creative Director: Jon Bancroft
Animation: Filip Stanek, Richard Janecek