Client’s challenge:

Modern-Expo designs sleek, energy-efficient self-service parcel lockers and modular retail displays. Ahead of EuroShop — one of Europe’s largest trade fairs with 2,000+ exhibitors, they had a striking booth setup with 15 screens in different formats, including massive 6K displays, but no content to run on them. In just two weeks, we produced ~20 cohesive animation pieces, tailored and optimized for each screen — something that would’ve taken 2+ months if done in full 3D.

Given the constraints, we decided to treat AI not as a shortcut, but as the core production method. Ultimately, both the static renders and animations — were built with AI & manual post-production in a hybrid workflow.

Team setup

A typical team for an AI-powered project like this usually includes:

• Producer — responsible for team setup and coordination, communication, timing, etc.
• Art Director — follows the CD vision throughout the project, builds references, moodboards, and works closely with the AI artist to achieve the best possible results.
• AI Artists — tune and mix models, build the generation pipeline, and ensure the style stays consistent.
• Editor/Motion Designer — assembles the generated shots into a coherent narrative, refines timing, and handles cutdowns for different formats. Makes manual corrections and fixes, text animation, etc.

Visual concept

At the start of the project, the client’s team shared initial visuals & direction with us — they already had a creative starting point. The concept was built around an otherworldly universe where their products exist in a futuristic, space-like environment.

We genuinely liked the idea and saw its strong visual potential. However, both we and the client understood that producing such a large volume of content within a very limited timeframe would make this level of complexity extremely challenging. A fully developed alien world requires extensive 3D modeling, texturing, and environment building. If characters, plants, clouds, or additional elements are involved, each of them also needs to be animated.

Executing this at scale under tight deadlines would be nearly impossible within a traditional production workflow.

First, we reviewed all tech specs for the exhibition screens and approved concepts & messages for each one.

Next came style exploration. Using the unexplored, alien-luke core theme from the client, we ran countless iterations — testing dozens of environments, light, and material combinations — until we landed on a design that felt premium and stayed flexible with different heroes and products.

We also created content for the screens built directly into the products. Conceptually, these played like classic product ads you’d see in a coffee corner or bakery setup — but instead of generic promos, they delivered Modern-Expo’s key messages.

To keep everything cohesive across the pavilion, we kept the same color palette and visual language, so the product screens felt like a natural extension of the main alien-luxe core world.

Stillshots

After settling on the final design, we created static keyframes as a pre-animation step.

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Timeline

• Setup + custom workflow + moodboards - 1 week
• Stillshots - 1 weeks
• Animation, Editing & Post - 1 week

Total project duration ~3 weeks

Advantages and limitations of an AI-driven approach

Advantages

• optimizes time and budget
• provides high style diversity
• speeds up exploration — you can test styles, shapes, and ideas in hours instead of days
• empowers teams to produce more content
• opens artistic directions that were previously impractical or too expensive

Limitations

• limited control
• technical limits on image/detail quality
• when it comes to complex motion or human animation, the style still feels artificial and lacks flexibility
• requires manual corrections
• unpredictable workflow due to the unpredictable tools’ performance and results

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AI can speed up production and let you experiment with styles, shapes, and ideas much faster than traditional methods — what might take days can happen in hours. It also helps smaller teams produce more content with fewer resources and opens up new creative possibilities.

That said, AI isn’t perfect. Fine-tuning details can be tricky, outputs can be unpredictable, and glitches often pop up, especially with complex motion. Keeping consistency across scenes is tough, and things like motion or lip sync sometimes need a manual touch.

AI is definitely not a silver bullet, but it’s an amazing new tool that opens a lot of possibilities for creatives.  Our team already actively uses various AI tools in production, and we plan to keep exploring new opportunities for ourselves and our partners.

We did this project in November, and the AI world has already changed since then (a usual thing). A lot of new upgrades dropped, and we’re testing them right now.

Want to create something like this together or just talk about AI in animation more? Let’s chat!