Humanverse Produces Films up to 6x Faster With Higgsfield

The challenge

Castorama didn’t want just another commercial. It wanted something completely new: communication that broke away from everything the brand had done before, with a jaw-dropping WOW effect. The occasion: launching its new design studios in stores across Poland.

The story follows a turtle moving to the seaside with his home on his back. The brief came through Ogilvy x Grey to Humanverse, one of the first and largest AI-native production houses in Poland and a long-term partner of Castorama, the largest DIY retailer in Poland. Castorama is also one of the country’s boldest brands when it comes to AI, always reaching for the next frontier.

That called for a disruptive hero. The film opens like a wildlife documentary, so the turtle had to look completely real. Moments later, the music kicks in and he surrenders to a wild, exhilarating rush.

That brought a second challenge: keeping a real animal believable in a completely unreal situation. He needed human traits, above all a smile, and the audience had to fall for him, with no doubt that he was happy and having the time of his life.

The film would also run on TV and in cinemas, so every frame had to hold up on the big screen.

The idea

Ogilvy x Grey’s insight was that no interior is as perfectly fitted as the inside of a turtle’s shell. That made a turtle the hero of a fantastical campaign story.

Castorama, which Humanverse describes as deeply invested in AI and hybrid production, was ready to make it that way.

How it was built

A story like this could never be filmed for real. The only realistic routes were a classic 3D pipeline or AI. Humanverse, producing alongside Papaya Films, proposed an AI production workflow, with Higgsfield as the main tool on the project.

Pulling it off meant total control: the story had to play out exactly as planned, shot by shot, with the same turtle from the first frame to the last. So the team first laid out the entire story in Unreal Engine as a very rough draft. They then used video-to-video in Higgsfield to turn that draft into the final footage.

The finale needed the most precision, because the turtle sequence ends with him morphing into a man filmed in live action. The turtle’s last moments had to be built so that the joy on his face carries straight into the man’s smile.

The art director, who is also a matte painter, built the start frames with multiple image models, including models on Higgsfield, and then edited every frame by hand to make it more cinematic. Those frames let the team reproduce the turtle precisely and keep him consistent from shot to shot.

The film is a hybrid production. The shots featuring people were filmed on set to capture real acting performances. The team then ran video-to-video on that footage too, changing the scenography of the room.

Higgsfield replaced the heavy 3D stage that would normally follow previs, art direction, and the live-action shoot, all of which stayed. The studio says it helped at every other step along the way as well.

It also changed how Humanverse works with directors. Antoni Nykowski, the film’s director, works in Higgsfield himself, so he was hands-on throughout, generating alongside the team.

The products

Higgsfield supported both image generation and video-to-video editing. Its image models formed part of the art director’s toolkit for developing start frames, alongside other models and her manual edits.

For video-to-video, Humanverse used two types of source footage. The rough Unreal Engine animatic established the story and supplied the footage for the turtle’s flight over the island. Higgsfield transformed that draft into the turtle’s island scenes. For the scenes featuring people, the team used video-to-video on footage of real acting performances to change the room’s set design. The film then went through post-production and color correction.

The result

Production took about a month, from the live-action shoot and Unreal Engine animatic through art direction, video-to-video, post-production, and color correction. Humanverse estimates the same film would have taken 4–6 months in a traditional 3D pipeline. The exact budget figures are confidential, but the studio estimates the same film in classic 3D would have cost 3–5× more.

Beyond this project, Humanverse says AI lets the studio run more projects at the same time.

Credits:

Client: Castorama Polska Sp. z o.o.

Agency: Ogilvy x Grey

Production: Humanverse_pl & Papaya Films

Director: Antoni Nykowski

DOP: Kamil Płocki

Creative Director: Jakub Kopiczynski

Creative Director, Humanverse: Paweł Mazurkiewicz

Producers: Michal Trusiewicz / Ela Trosińska

Post-production: Humanverse_pl & Miło Post

Sound: Głośno (Julia Nabielska, Filip Janukanis)

Color grading: Piotr Sasim

Online / Finishing: Tomek Miazga

Artists: Renata Rzyska, Agnieszka Nieroda, Ievgen Gaponov, Bart Bialobrzeski, Adrian Kowiński, Tomek Miazga, Jarosław Kapuscinski, Marcin Szymański, Adam Kryński, Michał Kwestarz, Oliwia Gojżewska, Kacper Wiącek, Piotr Soszyński, Magda Mazurkiewicz