Apple's been making some really fun advertising recently, from the vibrant MacBook Neo ads to the funny iPhone Duo TikToks.
The latest example is an Apple Games advert that might even impress Laika for how well it blends stop-motion animation with CGI wizardry. The company's now released a behind-the-scenes video showing how it was made – and perhaps to prove that it wasn't AI-generated.
Behind-the-scenes videos for pieces like this are becoming as important as the finished adverts themselves in these AI-dominated times. If your brand is going to invest in the expense of traditional, human-created art, you want to make sure that people recognise it as that and appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it.
The behind-the-scenes video for the Apple Games stop-motion ad is a wonderfully produced and edited ad in itself. It shows how the team sculpted and painted physical props, game characters and real-world sets and moved them frame by frame rather than relying on automated digital or artificial intelligence tools. We also see glimpses of software like Dragonframe being used to produce the animation on Macs.
It's a stark comparison to when Coca-Cola made a bizarre AI-narrated behind-the-scenes video to try to claim there was some artistry behind its AI-generated Christmas advert.
There may be a suspected design fail on the new MacOS 27 wallpaper, but I think we can forgive that when Apple's still producing things as impeccable as this.
