For the 2024 Runway AI Film Festival, Coca-Cola challenged the team at DOGSTUDIO/DEPT® to think big and push the boundaries of AI-assisted storytelling. 

With the creative freedom to explore what’s possible when AI meets human ingenuity, we explored different routes to AI filmmaking.

The result was two visually stunning short films— "Neon Nights" for Coca-Cola and "The Ripple Effect" for Minute Maid—each brought to life through a unique creative process.

Two brands, two distinctive approaches

Neon Nights

A high-energy adventure set in a glowing, nostalgic cityscape, the "Neon Nights" tale began with a hand-drawn storyboard. We meticulously sketched each scene and adapted them into a rough animatic to set the foundation for the rest of the AI-powered work. 

From there, we built an intricate claymation-inspired 3D world, transforming sketches into animation using ComfyUI, OpenArt, and Magnific AI. But AI alone wasn’t enough.

Every frame needed manual intervention, from upscaling visuals to perfecting the cinematic depth of each shot. We used Photoshop refinements to clean up artifacts, Firefly’s in-painting techniques to fix inconsistencies, and traditional compositing to bring the details of this layered world to life.

The Ripple Effect

A vibrant, heartwarming film about the power of human connection, "The Ripple Effect" took a different path to fruition. We started with live-action video footage filmed by our team IRL on a Chicago city bus. By focusing on capturing spontaneous human moments, we were able to catch the subtle expressions and natural movements that brought the story to life. 

The video footage became the basis for the film’s hand-drawn-inspired aesthetic, providing an instant reference for complex scenes with real spatial relationships and gestures that would have been tricky to achieve with frame-by-frame animation. 

We then tapped into a variety of AI tools to refine the visuals, adding dynamic color flows and smooth transitions to reinforce the story’s uplifting emotional tone. The final result balanced AI’s efficiency with our team’s attention to detail, ensuring the warmth and spontaneity of real human moments remained intact.

A showcase of imagination amplified by AI

Bringing these films to life required blending 12 different generative AI tools, custom models, and traditional animation techniques. 

Neon Nights’ hand-drawn animatics were transformed through a custom ComfyUI pipeline using AnimateDiff, LoRAs, and SDXL to achieve a rich, claymation-inspired look. 

Meanwhile, Ripple Effect’s live-action footage was transformed and stylized using a custom LoRA, ComfyUI, and After Effects as its foundation, proving that AI works best when grounded in genuine human emotion.

Over 600+ hours of production, we built a process in which AI accelerated workflows, but human expertise remained essential to shape the final products. Together, the films set a new benchmark for AI-assisted animation, proving AI is not a 1:1 replacement for creativity—but it’s an incredible tool that enhances it in collaboration with human intuition and artistry.