OMAR KARIM

The New Wave

For the first time, a brand can build a world and then live in it. Not one film and three cutdowns, but a coherent place with its own cast, light, weather and vocabulary, rendered into whatever format the moment asks for. Brand building used to be limited by how much you could afford to shoot. It is now limited by how well you can imagine and describe.

Which makes this a strategy problem before it is a production one. Scale without a point of view is only volume, and volume is what people already scroll past. The brands that get this right will be the ones that know what world they are building and why it is theirs.

It also means creative can finally move at the speed of culture and the speed of commerce at the same time, which are two clocks the industry has never managed to run together.

I wrote about the underlying shift in The Aleph of the Post-Photonic Era: In Praise of the Word. When images become free, the word becomes the valuable thing, and the brief stops being the instruction for the work and starts being the work.

I have been testing all of this from three sides: inside Meta Creative Shop, where creative performance was the job; with Google, prototyping video models before they shipped; and now as an advisor at #paid, researching how creator content performs under Meta's Andromeda retrieval layer.

Every project I take on is creative and research at once. I am obsessed with keeping creativity at the heart of automation.

Method

Three named methods. Insight, casting, production.

Latent Ethnography. Researching a brand's cultural world inside the model before generating anything. Built first for Boxfresh in Google AI Studio, where an AI ethnographic researcher reconstructed the brand's 1989 origin world and produced the style system every campaign variant was then generated from. Insight work, done in latent space.

Prompt Street Casting. Casting inside the model by prompting for place and demographic, then curating attitude as much as appearance. Made for Aries x Malibu, which went on to win three Lovie Awards.

Story to Video. Narrative-first film generation, built to produce volume without losing brand voice. Better input, better film. Currently being extended to high volume film production for social.

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

― Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983

The supreme defeat is resignation. The triumph over death and all things is by fearless desire. There is not one thing obtained in this world except by effort and struggle to render desire. The born genius is only spending the virtue of previous effort.



Ubique Daemon / Ubique Deus
Austin Osman Spare; Wikipedia^︎