Case study 04

The Hub & Unlock

AI-assisted commercial video and character production, directed by hand: storyboards, editorial control and voice stay with me.

Role: Producer, director, editor, character designer
Audience: Teachers and school leaders
Delivered: Video ads, game intros, a character-led PD series
Method: AI-assisted, human directed

The Hub promoProduced, edited and animated by me, with AI-assisted footage.

Strategic mandate

Two jobs, both on tight timelines and tighter budgets: explain a new platform to schools, and make professional development engaging for a room of adults.

The Hub is ProSolve's platform for measuring and building human skills in schools. Clients needed to see what it offered, so the sales team needed video ads that could explain it quickly and clearly, made fast and lean. Unlock is ProSolve's professional development program for adults, teaching teamwork and problem solving, and it had to be built on a very low budget.

The Hub: Video ads for ProSolve's school platform; Hub Arcade game intros
Unlock: Training videos for teacher professional development
My role: Producer, director and editor on The Hub. Art director, character designer, writer and producer on Unlock
Tools: AI image, video and voice tools, After Effects, Premiere Pro

Pipeline and governance

Hand-drawn boards, AI clean-up and AI video, edited by me. No film crews, actors or voice actors to schedule or pay.

Hand-drawn storyboardI sketch rough boards by hand to set the flow and the pacing.
AI board clean-upAI cleans the boards up, much faster than polishing every panel.
An AI still for each shotEach shot starts as an AI still, directed until the people act like people, then it is animated.
Final editI edit every video myself, with music, voiceover and graphics I animate in After Effects.

A Hub Action storyboard sheet beside the finished AI images for the same shots.

Rough sketch, AI clean-up, AI still, final editTwo moments from Hub Action, from my rough sketches to the animated shot in the final edit.

With the right direction, AI can produce remarkably human interactions. My standard is that AI footage should not feel like AI: people should behave like real people. AI drifts toward studio-perfect actors who seem to be acting, so I push it until people act like people.

The story, the scripts and the boards come first, and I keep control of the edit, the music and the voice. I direct these tools the way I direct a team.

Commercial work and character IP

The ads are the product demo. The characters are the series.

Hub ActionProduced, edited and animated by me, with AI-assisted footage.

Students working at a laptop in a bright classroom

For Unlock I designed Dr. Dillpickle, a mad scientist host, and Eleanor, the future-predicting robot who always predicts a horrible outcome for humanity: a retro computer with a pink bow, a prop turned character. I kept both consistent across every pose and expression, wrote the script and produced the videos.

Eleanor, a green retro computer with a pink bow — Eleanor

Unlock sneak peekA look inside the Unlock experience, cut from the series videos.

Impact

The Hub ads became one of ProSolve's primary sales tools for showing what to expect from the platform. Unlock participants love the experience.

Inexpensive marketing made quickly, and a professional development program that has been highly successful for ProSolve.

AI use: made with AI image, video and voice tools under my direction. Scripts are never AI.

NextIP Labs