I was invited back to work with Territory Studio and their partner 20SOMETHING on Bitdefender’s “they wear our faces” campaign as a creative technologist and On-Set VFX Supervisor.
AI has become the scammer’s tool of choice, and this campaign was designed to highlight that risk to people online and across every communication channel. The brief was to create five family personas using generative video AI to show just how realistic these “fake” faces and voices could be, the five characters were never real people, so they were not true deepfakes. The twist is that the only real face belongs to the scammer: a live actor whose on-screen presence and voice are genuine.
The campaign ran across digital billboards in multiple regions of North America, as well as on YouTube and mainstream social platforms. It caught the attention of Campaign Magazine, Ad Age, The Drum and Forbes.
While using deepfake AI technology to create the five faces was controversial, it proved that AI artists and creative technologists can readily achieve highly realistic faces, mannerisms and facial animation.
My role was to oversee the production of the five characters with the AI artists, as well as to generate the backgrounds for each scene’s story beat in ComfyUI—though these were ultimately dropped when the art direction shifted to a much darker, glitched film look to telescope that is was AI/VFX.
On set, as VFX supervisor, I was responsible for capturing 360° HDRI lighting and camera lens grids for each setup, and for working with the director and director of photography to ensure the action was compatible with Territory’s VFX production workflow.
