In partnership with
Visit Macon released 'Legends Loom Large', a tourism film in which Otis Redding, Little Richard and the Allman Brothers Band move through the modern city as giant figures. New York studio Versus Creative Studio made the whole thing, with the Otis Redding Foundation and the Redding family involved.
The icons are never fully shown. Clothing, movement and scale carry them instead, which keeps this on the right side of an uncomfortable line.
Where AI sat: Using Newt, Versus' proprietary AI software, the team integrated custom AI workflows alongside traditional visual effects, compositing, and finishing to create the campaign's larger-than-life musical icons. — shots
Today in Creative AI
UK agency Nest Commerce launched Hummingbird on TikTok last Wednesday, an AI creative platform built with a TikTok technology grant and announced on TikTok's own blog.
It reads how a brand's live ads are performing, works out which creative elements are landing, and builds the next round across static, motion and UGC-style formats while watching for fatigue.
Nest's own portfolio numbers, across 50-plus brands, put TikTok CPMs down 31% year on year with spend up 38%.
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Both stories put a machine in the middle of the work and a person at each end. Versus built its own post-production tool and still hired a director to point it.
Nest built a creative engine and makes a point of saying its own people stay in the middle of the process.
For brands: If the work depends on a likeness, bring the estate or the family in before the first render, the way Macon did. Justin Andrews of the Otis Redding Foundation spoke publicly about the city afterwards, which only happens when somebody asked first.
For agencies: A proprietary AI tool is a good thing to own and a weak thing to claim. Name the step it performed, as the shots piece did, or it reads as positioning.
Tool Review → Gamma
AI decks, documents and one-page sites from a prompt, priced in credits. Free gives 400 credits and 10 slides a prompt, Plus is $9 a seat a month, Pro $18 with custom branding and API access.
For a studio the real use is turnaround on a credentials deck nobody has the budget to design. The honest limit is the credit model, because cost per generation moves with the model and the complexity, so a month is hard to forecast.
Worth it if speed matters more than pixel control. Skip it if the deck is the deliverable, since removing Gamma's branding starts at the paid tier and real brand control at $18.
