FIRST Reveal

An AI Adventure

Each year we eagerly anticipate a fresh creative challenge in developing a season announcement video for our friends at FIRST, an organization that prepares young people for the future through a suite of inclusive, team-based robotics programs that blend the excitement of competition with the challenge of addressing global issues.
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Our belief in the power of human connection to inspire action brings Hardpin in close alignment with this mission, making the work we do with FIRST all the more valuable. This season's theme is “Oceans,” and although #watergame was not confirmed this year (google it), we did find ourselves unexpectedly charting new waters— with Artificial Intelligence.

Will
Hyler

Creative Director / Supervisor of
Motion Graphics

He/Him

Brainstorming and Concept Development

Our development process was inspired by a sense of adventure we felt in classic newsreels, radio broadcasts, and theme park rides. Think Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), or Disney's Strange World which evoke sense of excitement and responsibility. Given FIRST's focus on technology, we imagined an underwater hub where the competitions take place, seamlessly integrating the theme into the action. Brainstorming is an exciting phase of production where creativity flourishes, but eventually the practicalities of execution must be considered. Given our history of successfully blending images, footage, and animation to create unique worlds we felt confident that we could bring this to life, but the sea is full of surprises.

Production

To create space in the production timeline for some of our more ambitious creative ideas, our team strategically relied on stock video to build a foundation for our underwater world. Next, we turned to Cinema 4D and Redshift where we had the freedom to custom build a FIRST inspired sea base. 3D tools are enormously creatively empowering, but one of its persistent qualities is the render time/cost factor must be accounted for. Despite our success in building our base, a significant challenge emerged from the lack of suitable stock footage of research submarines. This turned out to be a crucial element for the piece, and without the budget to build and render photo-real images of research vessels interacting with sea life, we needed to find another solution.

Creative Challenges

Our industry, like so many, is deep in the process of understanding how AI can and will affect our work. AI's influence on image and video generation tools is still evolving, and its full potential has not yet been realized.

But we’ve been rolling up our sleeves and finding new ways to approach old problems with new tools, and under the sea we found a way to leverage both the strengths and weaknesses of the current generation of AI image generators. Though AI is known for odd inconsistencies like too many fingers on a hand, we leaned into this quality as an asset in order to create footage of submersibles that is both believable and are creatively shaped. AI video generators also have a tendency to produce odd morphing and transformations, but we found this quality very useful in our workflow for animating bubbles and dust.

Tests with image and video generators produced fast and believable results for this project, and by combining AI with traditional compositing techniques, we were able to create convincing images that would have been significantly more costly and time-consuming to produce using only traditional methods.

FIRST® Marketing Team

Impact and Reception

There’s a lot left to explore beneath the surface (and with AI), but through challenges like these we’re forging ahead. Reactions from FIRST and the community reaffirms our dedication to blending creativity with purpose, and we look forward to future collaborations that continue to inspire and challenge people across the globe.

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Global Leadership Awards

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