Awards Submissions

Starburst–Different Every Time

USING AN AI PIPELINE FOR STARBURST TO CREATE MODULAR CONTENT THAT IS “DIFFERENT EVERY TIME”

Our creative friends came to us with an innovative opportunity for their client, Starburst. They wanted to pay-off their creative tagline “Different Every Time” by creating unique animated worlds “unlocked” by consuming a Starburst. The trick is they wanted to create a LOT of different versions of the video and use a mixed media pipeline that leverages AI to develop the animation styles of the worlds.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Ad fatigue is real. It’s been proven that a brand sees diminishing returns after someone has seen an ad multiple times. To combat this, the goal was to take a modular content approach to the creative and production so that multiple variations of the commercial would be created and served to people before ad fatigue sets in.

THE CREATIVE

During the scripting phase, a formula was created with modularity in mind. The script was broken into 4x modular sections:

1. Establishing Scene

4x different opening scenes (Living Room, Library, Kitchen and Office) that mapped to different real-world scenarios where our GenZ audience may be consuming Starburst.

2. Consumption Moments

4x different opening scenes (Living Room, Library, Kitchen and Office) that mapped to different real-world scenarios where our GenZ audience may be consuming Starburst.

3. Worlds

The third portion of the video were the worlds that we transport the stars of our spot to after they consume the Starburst. In each video, we showed 3 different worlds each triggered by a consumption of a Starburst.

4. End Card

The final portion of the video were different end cards that had taglines specific to the type of person we were targeting when they were delivered the spot, e.g., in work, study, chill or eating mode.

THE SHOOT

We cast two actors to show the interplay between people enjoying life and Starburst together and shot them on a 1 day green screen shoot.

Knowing that we wanted to leverage an AI pipeline for the animation/stylization of each world, it was important to shoot with this in mind. Some of the considerations were having enough data within the footage being captured (e.g. foreground or background) for a seamless AI detection. We also had both motion and static camera shots and ultimately used the static as this was better for the AI to use.

A MIXED MEDIA PIPELINE

A mixed media approach was taken using 3D for the backgrounds of the opening shots, VFX for compositing the live action with the 3D environments, as well as for compositing the photoreal instances of the AI worlds with the live action footage of the talent, combined with an AI style transfer pipeline applied directly to the live action footage that stylized the talent and the background and added subtle motion.

THE PURPOSE FOR USING AI

AI was used to style and animate the :09 “bridge” in the middle of the videos to create a variety of different Starburst worlds. This approach allowed us to create a unique look that gives these commercials a new type of design style. We leaned into the AI, its weirdness and inconsistencies (between frames). It provides a look that we wouldn’t necessarily achieve with a traditional animation pipeline. Additionally, it allowed us to create a new pipeline for creating a # of animation worlds.

AI STYLE TRANSFER

To inform the animation styles, we generated images with the Getty Images generative AI platform. This allowed us to use design styles and images that were licensed. These assets were then used for style transfer. Images and assets were generated on a private and local environment.

In addition, this library also establishes the reference images for creating the different AI world styles (e.g, Papercraft or Y2K). This was a collaboration process between the agency and us on pulling image style references from Getty and customizing it with Photoshop. Once ready, our training process used IP Adaptors to train on this content and apply the AI world style to the video from the green screen shoot.

POST PRODUCTION

Ultimately, 20 AI World Styles were delivered and integrated into the different variations, which culminated to 60 unique 3 second sequences. This included 16x 100% AI Style Transfer Worlds and 4x Photo Real, compositing the talent from the shoot into the backgrounds generated using AI.

In summary, we output 320 videos in all aspect ratios (4x5, 16x9, 1x1, 9x16)