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Private follow-up · Prepared for David&Goliath
Thanks for making the time on Wednesday. We really enjoyed the conversation, and came away keen to keep it going.
Everything we talked about is gathered here in one place: Koubou, the tool we built to run generative work inside a real VFX pipeline; the Cheetos campaign and the making-of behind it; and the Lexus ES launch. There’s a short note on each — the films do the rest.
AI-native creative production, built to fit a real VFX pipeline
When no tool existed that could bring AI image and video generation into a real production structure, we built one.
Generation on its own is powerful and completely unstructured. Koubou is what puts the artist back in command of it: every generation lives inside our shot structure, follows our naming conventions, and moves through a locked-down pipeline with full version control.
Art directors iterate with tagged reference images — material, composition, lighting, mood — so creative intent holds across hundreds of shots instead of drifting. Overnight batches run with automatic retries and a live cost ledger, so nothing runs away and nothing gets lost.
No data leaves our infrastructure, and no model is hardwired. We swap generation engines to whichever suits the brief, without changing the pipeline underneath.
The human decides. The machine executes.
GUT Miami · RadicalMedia · directed by Dave Meyers
A high-octane heist in which Megan Thee Stallion and Nickelback liberate the world’s supply of Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle Cheetos.
When you see Megan surfing a wave of pickle dust, you aren’t thinking about neural networks or UV mapping. You’re watching a moment. That is the entire job — and the breakdown below is everything that went into protecting it.
The campaign needed authentic environments captured across several US cities, then married to elaborate VFX sequences at feature-level colour fidelity, on a commercial schedule.
Splats, sims, and a Manhattan we never had to shut down
The technical long version, for anyone who wants to know how the trick works.
4D Gaussian Splatting let us reconstruct real streets with full volumetric fidelity, so the campaign could travel across cities without extended location lockdowns. An ACEScg pipeline running at 16-bit floating point end to end held colour integrity through projection mapping, Houdini fluid simulation, blue-screen integration and frame interpolation.
We aren’t using AI because it’s the new shiny object. We’re using it to solve specific spatial problems — like how to put a custom-built Cheetos truck into a Manhattan street without actually shutting down Manhattan for a month.
Team One · Imperial Woodpecker · directed by Joe Connor
For the launch of the redesigned ES lineup, the brief was to break away from automotive advertising tropes and build something closer to cinematic art than a commercial.
Joe Connor’s narrative blurs the physical and the digital, moving from the stillness of an art gallery into a vivid, high-velocity desert — the gallery masterpiece unfolding into a living, breathing landscape. The vehicle is positioned not as a machine, but as an emotional canvas.
We built that transition: extensive previsualisation, rapid transition prototyping, and digital environment work that blends production plates with 3D world-building and matte painting. The desert was quietly engineered and massaged into place from the ground up, literally.
Less like a commercial. More like cinematic art.
Two internal tests, both aimed at the same automotive question
Change the world around the car — season, weather, time of day — while the car itself, its reflections, its details and the original camera move stay exactly as they were shot. A traditional automotive campaign needs location visits spread across the year to cover that. This gets the same coverage out of a single day, at full colour-grade-worthy quality.
Ongoing internal tests on a Toyota highway shot: the same drive re-skinned across mountain, coastal, desert and redwood, locked throughout to the original camera move, the vehicle’s motion and the director’s intent. Not client work — our own R&D, and the clearest picture we have of what regional and seasonal versions look like without a reshoot.
No reshoots. Nothing thrown away. The same drive, somewhere else entirely.
Happy to run either of these live for you — or point the approach at a piece of your own footage and show you the result.
Mostly what you have just watched, cut together — included for completeness