NIBS at Dublin AI Week: from sketch to AI commercial in about an hour

Well, I wasn't expecting that on a Friday night.

I went along to Dublin AI Week and found myself in a team of three, racing against time to create a commercial built around a brand character for a brand that didn't exist.

Working with the brilliantly imaginative Aoife Barry and Arisdelsi de la Garza Alcibia, we went from sketch to screen in about an hour. It was chaotic, sometimes nonsensical, and a lot of fun.

The result was NIBS: a chocolate character with a wardrobe problem and a theme song by RTHMIC.app.

Watch the NIBS commercial

Here it is, warts and all. You'll notice his trousers change between shots when they shouldn't. Changing his wardrobe is part of the story; the accidental changes are continuity errors. We left those imperfections in this version. This is what we made in about an hour, with more work needed before it could be a finished client commercial.

NIBS is sick of his boring brown chocolate pants. He's got personality, and he's ready to wear it on his sleeve. Or, more accurately, on his trousers.

His story is about taking a chance and letting a little more colour into his life.

From a sketch to a brand character

We started with a sketch and a character who wanted a change of clothes. It gave us a small problem to work with: how does a chocolate character express himself when everything about him is brown? The trousers gave us somewhere to start.

The Creative AI for Advertising session at Dogpatch Labs was part of Dublin AI Week. The brief took us from character development towards storyboards, animation, voice and video. Quite a lot to ask of a pair of trousers.

How our team made the video

We were shown different ways to develop and refine a character, and different teams will have their own processes. In the end, ours started with a hand sketch. We photographed it, took it into ChatGPT to develop the character, then moved to Grok to generate the video.

RTHMIC.app generated a custom jingle. Then, for hands-on control, we brought the three video generations into Final Cut. We laid them out and cut them into five moments, with a still frame at the end, to match the timing of the music.

Open the Final Cut screenshot at full size

Getting shots out of a generator gives you material to edit. You still have to decide what belongs next to what, how the music fits, and whether the character makes sense from one shot to the next. As his trousers demonstrate, that last bit needs attention.

Something to watch. Something to work on.

An idea can sound perfectly sensible while it's still being described. Put it on screen and you give everyone something specific to respond to. Does the character work? Does the joke land? What needs fixing?

That's a useful place for an experiment like this in developing a brand film or campaign. Making a rough version helps you work out what the idea needs. Some of that only becomes obvious once you can watch it.

NIBS was a playful exercise for an invented brand. For a client, we'd need to know who the film is for and what it needs to do, then give the story, continuity and finish the attention they need.

About an hour got us from a sketch to a character with a story and a song. It also gave us a fairly clear list of things to fix. Starting with his trousers.