Coke Goes Retro with Gen AI

PLUS: How to Drone Effectively

Author

Steve
November 26, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

🧑‍✈️ How to Drone Effectively

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Coke Goes Retro with Gen AI

A big fat caveat to start: I am not an expert on advertising! When I was a kid, I was put in charge of creating flyers for our family’s garage sale and not only did I misspell “garage” as “garbage,” but I put the wrong date AND time! On a Sunday night at 10PM we discovered an unruly man on our front porch demanding our trash. And we gave it to him! We never had a garage sale again, and now my childhood bedroom has been completely filled with old furniture and cookware.

All this to say: advertising isn’t really my strong point and not a subject in which I have significant expertise. It’s a different medium than film and television, and has widely disparate aims. Or should, anyway. But I’m going to opine nonetheless!

Back in May, I covered the outcry around the Apple “Crush” ad, and now we have a fresh new AI-related ad controversy, courtesy of Coca-Cola. Below is one of three ads generated with AI:

What’s the most unsettling part of this ad to you? For me, it’s probably this:

If you saw that same face peering out of your darkened closet, you’d be terrified! It reminded me of another scary face from the 1980s slasher horror classic Sleepaway Camp.

According to Forbes:

Three AI studios (Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card) worked to create these ads, using the generative AI models Leonardo, Luma and Runway, with a new model, Kling, brought in near the end of production.

The Forbes article is remarkably critical for such a business-friendly publication, collecting not only the Internet’s critical reactions to the ads, but offering its own very negative impression:

It is telling that the face of Santa Claus never appears onscreen, only his swollen, rubbery hand, clutching a Coke bottle. One can only imagine the leering faces of Santa that the AI models generated—who needs the Nightmare Before Christmas when we have the fever dreams of AI?

…Ironically, the ads do not successfully sell generative AI as a useful tool; the footage is a poor copy of a successful, human-crafted ad that has managed to remain memorable through the decades.

I think this last point is key, and is the thing that continuously sticks in my craw about the tech industry-generated hype that surrounds generative AI products: what it’s generating is just a copy of something already made. It’s telling that we don’t have one instance of being shown something we’ve never seen before. Just from the perspective of the innovation of tech in the past, from smartphones to social media to streaming, isn’t that troubling?

How to Drone Effectively

I have a mixed opinion on the use of drones for film and TV production. On the one hand, they can absolutely add production value for lower budget projects by simulating expensive helicopter shots. On the other hand, they get used for ridiculous nonsense like this:

As someone notes in the replies, this doesn’t build excitement so much as look like it’s shot from the perspective of an angry ghost. Do we need all this flying around to build tension? It has the opposite effect.

However, I very much enjoyed stumbling across the work of Russian filmmaker Mikhail Parkhomenko, who uses FPV (first-person view) drones to do some very fun and exciting work (turn on looping for the full effect):

This is the type of technological innovation to filmmaking that is actually exciting: allowing us to see something that would previously have been impossible and in so doing supplementing the action one the screen!

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

The production secrets behind the latest Wallace & Gromit film. (link)

AI slop is overrunning the publishing site Medium. (link)

Amazon Prime’s big AI-powered updates to X-Ray. (link)