Vodka Cruiser
Buy & Fly
Project Category
AI / Art Direction / Social
Agency
The Idea Shed
Client
CUB
Amplifying for Euro Summer
Vodka Cruiser wanted social-first content to extend its Buy & Fly promotion beyond standard campaign animations. The brief needed to make the prize—winning a European summer getaway—feel immediate, playful and made for the platform, while keeping production lean and fast.
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Rather than disguising the production limitations, the creative embraced them. A deliberately obvious green-screen treatment created a self-aware, knowingly cheesy visual language—closer to a social-media filter than a polished travel commercial. This made the work feel native to a TikTok-fluent audience and aligned with Vodka Cruiser’s tongue-in-cheek brand personality.
The Idea
The content placed the talent in three instantly recognisable Euro-summer fantasies:
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A sun-soaked European beach
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A metro-station streetscape
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A playful Paris landmark moment
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The scene started in the intentionally artificial studio setup, then transported the talent through quick, exaggerated green-screen transitions. The contrast between the low-fi production device and aspirational destinations became the joke: a Cruiser was the shortcut to imagining yourself already on holiday.
AI-led pre-production
To align the client, talent and production team before the shoot, I built an AI-assisted storyboard that established the visual world, styling, props, poses and intended movement for each scene. Instead of relying on generic reference images, I began with a base image of the talent and used AI to explore pose variations, scene compositions and indicative European styling.
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This made the storyboard a practical art-direction tool rather than only a mood reference. It clarified how each transition would work, allowed styling requirements to be resolved earlier, and gave the team a consistent visual target on a compressed timeline.
Iconic Paris
Euro Streets
Euro beach look
My role & impact
I led art direction and directed the shoot, shaping the social-native visual style from concept through to production. AI helped turn a small, fast-turnaround social brief into a more precise and considered production: it reduced uncertainty around posing and scene construction, created stronger client alignment before filming, and focused limited on-set time on performance and execution.
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The result was a distinctive set of social assets that amplified Buy & Fly with a platform-aware visual idea—proving that intentional craft, not a large budget, can make low-fi content feel creatively owned.
Storyboard
