This year’s Primary Christmas message takes the shape of an Instagram Reel, featuring character-led Christmas baubles, singing Feliz Navidad. What else!
Festive, fun, and straight from the imagination of our Creative Director, Adie. (Watch the full Reel here.)
But behind the playful characters sits something more meaningful. This campaign became an invaluable R&D exploration in AI-generated creative content and how these tools can enhance client deliveries.
The Why.
We set ourselves the challenge of producing a piece of content that pushed generative AI as far as realistically possible, while still relying on established design and video-production skills.
Character design, animation, compositing, and final video assembly, all explored to understand what’s currently achievable, and what isn’t, for brand storytelling.
Our initial concept (Santa’s rooftop footprints forming our Christmas message) quickly demonstrated the reality of working with AI: not all ideas survive the workflow. The outputs were unpredictable, the visuals inconsistent, and ultimately, we had to step away.
Recognising when to pivot and building flexibility into the process became one of the project’s biggest lessons.
Building a New Creative Concept
We shifted to a more adaptable creative direction: a Christmas tree filled with AI-generated bauble characters, led by a guitar-playing frontman inspired by José Feliciano.
Creating him, along with supporting angels, penguins, Santas and more, required dozens of reference images, multiple rounds of prompt engineering, and continuous refinement. Limited historical photography for the central character meant building his likeness from fragments, adjusting repeatedly until we achieve a version that felt right.
Meanwhile, the tools themselves evolved throughout the project. AI-image editing and video-enhancement features improved week by week. That meant pieces that were hard to achieve at the start became easier as we progressed, a clear demonstration of the pace at which AI is advancing.
Animating, Lip-Syncing, and Assembly
Once characters were finalised, each underwent Photoshop refinement before being reintroduced into various AI engines for animation, movement passes and lip-syncing.
Across Adobe tools, Runway, Chat GPT, Firefly, Gemini, Nano Banana, Minimax Hailuo, Hedra, GEN, and VEO, each stage functioned like a separate micro-project, with new prompts, tests, and corrections. The lip-syncing alone involved recording reference audio, phonetic transcripts, and multiple rounds of frame-by-frame editing and alignment.
The final video was then assembled through layered compositing, colour matching, lighting overlays, masking, tree-light animations and continual refinement. For perspective, 139-character files were created before we even began the video phase.
Why this Matters for Clients
Although this wasn’t a commercial brief, the exercise was hugely valuable for our creative and technical development.
Our key learnings included:
- Flexibility – AI doesn’t always follow direction. Creative agility and adapting the idea while maintaining intent is essential.
- Speed of development – Even with hands-on experience, the rate of AI progress is astonishing. Tools changed dramatically over the course of a single month.
- New production workflows – AI is reshaping timelines, budgets, and expectations. What once needed large budgets and long lead times is now possible in days.
- Acceptability thresholds – Knowing when a piece meets its purpose and when further polishing becomes counterproductive is now a key judgement call.
This kind of experimentation helps us to stay ahead of creative shifts, so when clients need innovative content, we already have practical, proven experience to draw upon.
A Festive Experiment with Value
A year ago, this project would have been unachievable without extensive 3D modelling, making it unrealistic for a campaign of this type. Today, AI makes expressive, playful, and cost-effective content far more accessible, especially when combined with traditional design and post-production expertise.
Our Christmas Reel may be light-hearted, but the learning behind it is already shaping what’s possible for our clients in 2026 and beyond.