Best Phones Forever: AI Road Trip
A web tool to send the Pixel 8 and iPhone friends anywhere you can dream of.
The #bestphonesforever campaign for the Google Pixel was a popular and successful series of films created by The Mill's Design team in partnership with Google Creative Lab. Over the course of 2 years, there are nearly 20 films created with various conversations and adventures for the two phone friends.
In the Spring of 2024, Google wanted to showcase the power of their Gemini AI tools for content creation through a fun and participatory social campaign. But how? We sent the phones on a Summer Road Trip by building a content creation tool that created a film for any location.
I was the Technical Director on the project, starting with the initial approach pitch and research, all the way through production and launch. And I also got my hands dirty writing some of the timeline editor code.
Original #bestphonesforever Campaign Film: "Coachella"
One of the fun original campaign commercials to build the world of the phones.
Unleashing the Full Power of Google Gemini and Imagen
The plan for this campaign was to build a tool that a special team within Google Creative Lab could use to quickly create videos based on Location ideas in the Instagram comments.
The campaign approach was fairly straight forward. A content creator would enter in a location, then be guided through a few easy steps to select from AI-generated background and script options, along with special Text-to-Speech tools. From there, they would be able to edit the timing of the elements in a non-linear timeline editor, add animations, and send to the render system that would combine all the elements into a designer-crafted scene in Unreal Engine, and automatically render a video to be posted back to Instagram.
we built a tool that combined the power with Generative AI with the control of a custom-built 3D scene.
With the scene's AI-generated elements ready, creators could fine-tune the timing of camera cuts and animations, choose music or background sound, and even choose accessories for each phone.
Each film had its own custom poster frame rendered as well. Pixel fans got VERY creative with the idea of what a location could be, and our generative prompts delivered every time.
Demo Video: "New York"
One of the hundreds of generated videos from the tool. Videos were pre-rendered to be formatted for Instagram.
On launch day, 25 creators generated over 500 videos in 16 hours. Average creation time including rendering was just under 5 minutes for each video, and no one ever had to wait for the render farm to catch up. The campaign became the most successful campaign for the Pixel to date.