Project Reset is a men's SPF 15 lip balm. That is the least interesting sentence you'll read today. What's interesting is that the launch campaign — the hero visual, the two anchor films, the four social cutdowns — was made without a camera, a location scout, or a single day on set. This is how we did it, and what an AI film studio looks like from the inside.
The brief
The client wanted "premium, but not precious." Men's grooming has a bad habit of looking either like a razor commercial or a cologne ad. We wanted the opposite: something a bit weird, a bit mythic, and impossible to confuse with a competitor's shelf. See the finished spots in the Reel Room if you haven't already.
Concept: the serpent and the stone
We locked two motifs early — a photoreal blue-and-white snake, and sunlit limestone. Snakes are shorthand for renewal (skin, shedding, "reset"). Limestone reads as ancient and clinical at the same time. Together they gave the campaign a language: cold, dry, alive.
Every AI shot in the campaign obeys those two rules. If a frame doesn't have snake energy or stone energy, it gets cut. That's the whole codex.
Pre-production, without a set
Traditional pre-pro is casting, location, styling, storyboards. Ours was shorter:
- Reference deck. 30 stills — nature photography, editorial fashion, Wong Kar-wai stills. Every prompt later borrows from this deck.
- Shot list. 14 frames total across two films and one hero image, storyboarded in a single afternoon.
- Product plate. One clean product photograph, shot on an iPhone in a window. That's the only "real" asset in the campaign.
Generation, in three passes
Pass 1 — stills
We generate every hero frame as a still first. Frames are cheap, arguments are cheaper. The snake key-visual went through 41 stills before we picked one. On a live set, that's 41 relightings.
Pass 2 — motion
Only approved stills go into the video model. We prompt for camera motion (a slow parallax push, a subtle breeze in the grass) and generate 5-second clips. Most shots are one clip; the longer films are two or three clips edited together.
Pass 3 — composite
The real product plate gets integrated into every shot in comp. This is the step that sells it. AI can generate an object that looks like your product; it can't generate your product. Compositing solves that in five minutes per shot.
Post: the part that makes it feel expensive
We treat AI clips the same way a colorist treats camera-original footage. That means:
- Grade every clip through a shared LUT so the campaign feels like one film.
- Add real optical grain — the flatness is what people register as "AI."
- Cut to a proper sound design pass. A great ad is 60% sound. Nobody tells you this.
What it took
Total production timeline: 9 days from brief to final delivery. Team of three — one AI generalist, one editor, one director. No location, no camera, no talent day-rates. The finished spots have been running as paid social for the last quarter and outperform the client's previous live-action work on retention and CTR.
What this means for your brand
Project Reset isn't a novelty. It's the new baseline for what a launch film can cost and how fast it can move. If you have a product with a real story and no budget for a real shoot, this is the shape of the next five years.
Want your own? Tell us what you're launching.
