Recently there was an ad released for the mobile game Solitaire Cash by Papaya, which featured celebrity sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, and which seems to have attracted an absolute metric ton of controversy on multiple fronts.
All this is something I really couldn’t care less about, but I gotta say, getting caught playing the game you’re pushing (during the NBA finals, nonetheless) at least reveals a certain degree of consistency. 😉
The ad was created by The Artery, and featured a lot of generative AI visuals, which of course just served as a magnet for yet another layer of controversy from the anti-AI activist crowd.
Nevertheless, the Artery guys did an interesting writeup about the production process for the ad.
I was also approached to contribute some visuals to the spot. I created several ultra-high resolution still plates for shots to be animated by a combination of AI and traditional VFX.
I came in very late in production and ran into some scheduling mishaps as well, so only one of these shots (the bar scene) ended up in the final ad.
Here’s 3 of the plate images:
For anybody interested, these are links to full native resolution (5376 x 3072) versions:
Bar Scene
Bicycle Scene 1
Bicycle Scene 2
…and this is the final ad: