Deepal

This idea was almost impossible to execute fully in camera without blowing the budget. The scale, the location, and the requirement for a working barge in perfect light made it unrealistic. Rather than defaulting to CGI, Andreas used AI as a tool.

The campaign remained grounded in real photography. Andreas photographed the landscapes first, then used those images to build an AI layout, introducing an AI car and talent to test perspective, scale and lighting. Once the composition was resolved, the AI background was removed and replaced with the original in-camera landscape. Andreas then photographed the real car and talent to precisely match the AI layout and lighting, before compositing them back into the frame.

The result is a genuinely photographic image, with the exception of the barge. One of the key advantages was the AI-generated car shadow, which integrated seamlessly and felt more natural than a constructed Photoshop shadow. In this case, AI wasn’t a shortcut, it was simply the better tool than CGI.