a combat-sports ad, cast entirely in pixels
watch it first
before the how — here's the finished ad, made entirely in ai. press play:
my own brand, no budget to shoot it
Hey Coach is my martial-arts course brand — kickboxing, muay thai, regeneration, fight-prep, taught online. it needed a real ad, but not a real ad budget: no studio day, no fighters on call, no tropical location, no drone. so we made the whole film in ai and spent the budget on craft instead of logistics.
~30 looks to lock one lead face
the story: a burnt-out office worker finds Hey Coach and turns into a fighter. that arc needed one lead whose face survived every cut. the trouble — the site had only a handful of real photos to work from. so i generated the lead over and over, roughly ~30 look-variants, until one face held, then built it into a card i could reuse shot to shot.
the craft is consistency
for every character i built a full bible in Hailuo — from real trainer photos: turnarounds, height chart, expressions, gear, right down to the Hey Coach Production patch. that's what keeps the same face and the same kit alive across dozens of separate generations. these boards are the case.
one location bible, every environment
the world got the same treatment — a location bible per space: floor plan, the four wall views, materials, even the light and the mood notes. the anchor was the Hey Coach gym — branded wall, water cooler, focus mitts on the hooks — then the office, the beach and the mountain for the training montage. one consistent world the fighters could move through.
Seedance 2 — and the fight that fought back
animation ran in short multi-shot bursts in Seedance 2. the hard part was the fighting: the model didn't always understand a kick or a punch's mechanics, so the tough strikes had to be generated one shot at a time. the other lesson came from the storyboards.
✗ early on: i boarded the story six frames to a page — but across a sequence the face drifted, shot to shot.
✓ the fix: drop the multi-shot boards and generate every frame on its own. slower, but the face finally held — and the strikes landed.
CapCut edit + a custom skill hud
final assembly in CapCut. the signature detail: a custom animated skill-level hud. i designed a few variants, locked one, then animated it to the footage in Remotion — a level meter that climbs as the office worker turns fighter, the ad's whole throughline made visible on screen.
where it all lands
the arc the whole build pays off: burnt-out office worker → fighter — the same lead, one consistent face, from the cold open to the last frame.
who made it
the team behind it:
you don't need a set, a cast, or a camera to make an ad that hits. you need a consistent world and the patience to build it frame by frame. that's the craft i run.