 It was very much like shooting an avatar or like a fully CG movie where the actors had to just kind of respond or pretend to be in these like totally invisible environments. It's like you're on a boat, like you're on a boat. The actors like were confused but also didn't really ask questions, they kind of just went with it. I was just like, trust me, it's gonna work. But in the back of my head I was like, will it? All it takes is a rake and a pole and a piece. My name's Edmond Allen. I'm a creative director at AKQA. My name is Heather Harlow. I am an executive producer at AKQA. My name is Corwin Carroll. I'm the managing director of post-production at Art Class. My name is Paul Trillo. I'm the director. I'm Alexandra Anderson and I am the senior director of Brand and Creative at GoFundMe. So do you want to start by talking a little bit about how this idea first came together? GoFundMe came to us with a pretty amazing brief and an amazing opportunity. They had a year in review video that they were trying to do while sort of reframing their brand to be more about, you know, the collective power of help. We at GoFundMe can see the impact of donors and the generosity and kindness that happens every day on the platform. We wanted to have an emotional piece of content that could really help connect donors to their own kindness and help them see the impact that they have on the world. We really wanted to use AI-generated animations and use those tools to tell human stories. We're trying to look at this from a lens of how do we add an extra layer of community and that's sort of how the community mural landscape and I guess canvas ended up being our bigger picture that we could string all of these stories together. Paul and I talked and then we talked with Heather and was like, hey, we can do some really exciting stuff here. Everything up until that point had been very gimmicky in terms of the use of AI and advertising. I think about these tools in a much more conceptual way rather than just trying to do a flash of the pan and like how this can actually transform process and how this can open up new creative concepts and also new aesthetics. So they had this outpainting idea and I was like, okay, great, it's using story now with AI. We did have a live action shoot component. This idea behind the live action was to anchor the spot in reality. We ended up having this big beautiful studio space indoors where we could put tracking markers and use some of our talent to create these movements that we could then put into AI. Those natural subtle nuances are captured right there on the fly versus trying to replicate those. And that's traditional motion capture. And so it's just applying that same principle into, okay, that's going to be the source and we're going to have that generate animations back to us. I think the breakthrough was when I figured out this still needs to use traditional animation techniques. Seeing how many steps and how much human intervention is needed to make AI run smoothly. It was incredible. It was a parallel path. Paul's team was really deep in testing and experimenting. I think it was really realizing when to use and when not to use AI, finding how to control the chaos of AI. Yeah. That was the whole balance here. It's like, how do you tame this beast? Did you have any concerns when you brought this idea? I think there were certainly a few times where we're like, what's this going to look like in the end? Not nervousness, but just like, you know, curiosity. On one hand, we just did our best to really educate ourselves. And on the other hand, we just worked to make sure that they weren't referencing a specific artist, but that it was really done as authentically and ethically as possible. There was a huge transformation process. So when you transform something enough, it becomes your own. After we presented the potential of using this AI technology and after we had discovered Paul, that excited everybody on board. I think the magic ingredient in doing something that's never been done before is having that client agency production company relationship to say, like, hey, we're going to go into this and we're going to discover it together. What was the timeline like from conception to the ad being released? We got briefed in September and the output final delivery was December. I think we had like under six weeks from like the shoot to actually delivery, like a nearly two minute animation. Just couldn't do that in an ordinary workflow. The timing to do frame by frame animation, yes, in the past would have production repercussions with the advent of this type of AI animation where the frame by frame hand painted feel was generated. So that doesn't necessarily add a burden of work anywhere in the process because it's so efficient that exploratory time expands. You can explore and you can actually improve ideas. So we had like that one that was like kind of like a town square. And then we transformed it into a neighborhood. At some point it was like, you know what, the town square is not really reading. We'd like to go ahead and maybe try to put this in a suburban neighborhood. If we were to shoot that the old fashion way or animated the old fashion way would have been locked in. And so I think that is really the credit to a how can we do more with less using AI and be what is it that we can create using all these new and exciting tools that even since we finished that project have evolved. We had a lot of producers and a lot of creators that had a great understanding of production, but this kind of flipped production on its head. Paul Trillo's team, our class, Corwin, AKQA and GoFundMe, we essentially held hands together and jumped into this unknown. We worked so closely together and we formed a lot of trust and a bond between each other because there were some leaps of faith and things that we couldn't quite visualize or hadn't been done before. What was the response like once the ad finally came out? From our standpoint, it was it was incredible. You know, the public sentiment was just amazing. They gave people the warm and fuzzies at a time that they probably needed it. We set out to really create this emotional connection and give people hope and see that they were making a difference. And when we were started to read the YouTube comments, we could see that people were feeling that connection. They were sharing their own GoFundMe stories, thanking GoFundMe and the agency for creating this piece of content that gave them hope. And that was just so exciting, I think, in a world where you don't always get to hear that kind of feedback from the people that you're hoping to reach. It was really meaningful for us to see that it was landing and that they were feeling connected to the content. From what I saw, everyone's like, oh, this is how you should use AI. This is like a good use of AI. How did this whole process kind of inform your view of what role AI should play in, like, a creative or production process? I see AI playing a role like any other plugin that we use now in visual effects or animation. There's multiple tools out there, and much like a mixed media artist, you're going to pick and choose which tool you can combine to create this effect. So overall, you are the artist that's actually controlling the end piece. It's an asset generation tool. It's not, like, creative, you know? It also doesn't understand emotion. Which is, as part of a big storytelling thing, it's never going to spit back something where you go, oh, that made me feel something. It might look cool, but you have to have the human element to overtake the artificial element if you want to inject that bit of humanity to it. At the end of the day, you need a good story.