To promote its limited event series, Next, starring John Slattery (Mad Men), Fox partnered with creative agency space150 to create a trailer produced by artificial intelligence, which is the show’s central topic.
In the series, Slattery plays Paul LeBlanc, genius architect of an artificial intelligence of which he’s lost control and now seems to want to destroy humanity. LeBlanc’s on a mission to warn the world and finding it hard to convince people that he’s sane.
For the spot, space150’s engineering team analyzed the show using facial recognition technology to sort all of the scenes in which each actor appears. Along the way, the team also analyzed every frame’s emotion in order to create an “emotion index,” as well as color, luminosity, contrast and sound to add additional data points.
Space150 then took all of that data to build out a three-act trailer so the bot could find scenes for “happy,” “paranoid” and “action.” Artificial intelligence then wrote a voiceover script using dialogue about AI, and it also wrote the music. Space150 took that score and digitized it before composing a new score from that original piece. Finally, space150 paired script lines with scenes the bot extracted and laid them out so they flowed with the music and the spot’s three-act structure.
CREDITS
Client: Fox
Agency: space150
Executive Creative Director: Ned Lampert
Post-Production Editor: Josh Lundquist
Engineering: Drew Wiskus
Sound Editing: Brad Scott