Billy Boman

In 2024, I had the incredible privilege of working as the AI Artist for a series of five Ballantine’s Whiskey ads targeted at the Polish market—one of the key EU regions where Ballantine’s has experienced impressive double-digit growth and success. This marked our first foray into a new hybrid filming technique, blending traditional and cutting-edge methods. My role as the AI Artist was to craft hyper-realistic, lifelike environments and backgrounds, elevating the visual storytelling of the campaign. The Process: ✅ AI-Generated Backgrounds: I created 4K-resolution, photorealistic AI backgrounds, which were displayed on massive LED screens during filming. ✅ Camera Setup: The camera was positioned 3.5 to 4 meters away from the LED screens, creating a natural separation between the foreground and background. This distance allowed us to blur the pixels on the screen, ensuring seamless integration. Extensive adjustments were made to align the camera’s perspective with the angles of the AI backgrounds, enhancing their realism. ✅ Casting & Props: Local talent was carefully selected, and props were placed in front of the LED screens. Each element was designed to complement the AI backgrounds, creating an immersive environment. ✅ Lighting & Integration: The lighting for the actors and props was meticulously matched to the AI backgrounds, ensuring that they blended together seamlessly and looked completely natural. ✅ Five Unique Ads: We filmed five distinct ads, each set in AI-generated locations reflecting Polish culture—cityscapes, forest festivals, cozy cabins, vintage apartments, a Ballantine’s-themed bar, gaming arenas, and more. This approach enabled us to "transport" the production to these stunning, yet otherwise unattainable locations within our project’s budget and timeline. ✅ Post-Production: The post-production process was handled with the utmost precision, delivering crisp, polished editing and motion design that brought the entire project to life. This innovative method of incorporating AI into the filmmaking process not only solved logistical challenges but also saved significant costs and time that would otherwise have been spent on traditional location shoots. Directed by the talented Priit Palumaa, whose vision and treatment elevated the project, this campaign was a true collaboration. His openness to exploring how AI could enhance the creative process played a key role in bringing this project to life.

"Born Free" delves into the heart of subversive countercultural aesthetics, merging the rebellious spirit of rock and roll with the enduring symbolism of subcultural uniformity. At its core, the film centers on the iconic black leather jacket and the classic five-pocket denim, using them as symbols of timeless resistance and pop-cultural defiance. The narrative examines their role as both emblems of individual expression and as instruments of societal rebellion, highlighting the delicate balance between personal identity and social conformity. Created entirely with Google DeepMind’s Veo 2 model, this film pioneers the potential of AI-generated cinema. The model’s remarkable ability to produce hyper-realistic, dynamic visuals transforms New York City into a vivid, textured backdrop for the protagonist’s everyday experiences. Her journey—marked by moments of skateboarding through the urban maze and commanding the stage at an underground concert—becomes a kinetic dance of movement and cultural assertion, blending the ordinary with the extraordinary. This experimental narrative challenges traditional advertising conventions by reimagining live-action realism through an avant-garde lens. The striking contrast between vibrant, digitally rendered film grain and stark black-and-white imagery brings an analog quality to the digital world. It evokes nostalgia for 20th-century cinema while embracing the technological edge of the 21st century. The visual contradictions between grayscale and bursts of color symbolize the tension between permanence and change, structure and freedom. By pushing the boundaries between commercial media, narrative film, and digital art, Born Free breaks free from the confines of traditional advertising. It becomes a bold critique of contemporary visual storytelling, positioning itself as a pioneering work in AI-driven cinematic experimentation. Its avant-garde approach offers a new vision of how future technology can reinterpret and reshape the cultural icons of the past.