AI creative agency faith marks first birthday with release of animated short film

Cristina Blanaru Business, Creativity, Digital & Media

faith, VCCP’s AI creative agency, has today released an animated short film, made using Gen-AI to celebrate its first birthday.

‘finding faith’ was created to explore the practical uses of generative video for brands today by adhering to a consistent brand world. The faith team decided on the project as a way of “demonstrating the craft it takes to control AI to meet our creative standards, instead of letting AI control how much we lowered them”.

faith chose to work with their own brand world with their characters ‘girl’ and ‘robot’ (representing humanity and Gen-AI) featuring in an animated origin story which illustrates their founding idea that Gen-AI, when used properly can serve as an accelerator of human creativity.

The story captures the moment a young girl overcomes her initial fear and takes a leap of faith in befriending a lost robot, an act that unlocks their combined potential. Inspired by anime films, everything from the script to storyboards, animation and music was created using AI tools. The small team behind the film combined more than 15 different tools in total to complete production in just four weeks – reducing costs by an estimated 85%.

Ben Hopkins & Morten Legarth, Creative Directors at faith, said:

“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 to take full advantage.
“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.”

The film will be released on social channels and is accompanied by a making of film which shares some of the lessons learned during the project.

VCCP is an international integrated communications agency, founded in 2002 on the principles of simplicity, collaboration, un-preciousness and integration around ideas rather than channels. It is the challenger agency for challenger brands and transform the fortunes of our clients by challenging and disrupting the categories they operate in.

With offices in London, Madrid, New York, Prague, San Francisco, Shanghai and Singapore, VCCP produces award-winning work for clients including Walkers, Virgin Media O2, ComparetheMarket, easyJet, Domino’s, Canon, Cadbury, Sage and White Claw.

Credits finding faith campaign

  • CEO: Michael Sugden
  • CSO: Michael Lee
  • Head of Faith: Alex Dalman

CREATIVE

  • CD: Ben Hopkins & Morten Legarth
  • Prompt & Diffusion Engineer: Gabriele Lanzafame
  • Creative Innovation Lead: Peter Gasston
  • Midweight Creative: Vicky David

Account Management

  • Managing partner: Kerry Howell
  • Business Director: Sam Whiston
  • Account Manager: Mai Trinh

Data

  • Data Strategy Director: Yariella Coello
  • Head of Data Science & Analytics: Lucy Chaudhuri

Planning

  • Senior Planner: Amber Smith
  • Junior Planner: Liberty Covill

Production

  • Senior Integrated Creative Producer: Charlotte McCluskey
  • Executive Producer: Jake Hafer
  • Producer: Miriam Deas
  • Videographer: Ed Roe
  • Assistant Filmmaker: Farihah Chowdhury

Post Production

  • Post Producers: Amira Petker & Elliott Watson
  • Editors: Amelia Eve, Adrian Scanlon & Mark Singer 
  • Grade: Syd Harvey 
  • Sound Design & Music: Emily Vizard 
  • BTS Editor: Jess MacLeod
  • MCR: Bevan Edwards, Anil Douglas & Alex Reid 

3D

Project Director: Ravi Patel

Creative Director: Jon Bancroft

Animation / Modelling: Filip Stanek & Richard Janecek

Design:

Resource Lead: Rachael Hinge

Senior Designer: Rohit Sharma, Miguel Silgado & Tom Widdrington 

Senior Assistant Artlab Manager: Sam Weight

PR & Marketing

Senior Group Communications Manager: Alastair Smith

Group New Business & Marketing Manager: Ollie Bowen

Legal

Head of Legal: Rebecca Coleman