The Creative Design Sprint 2024 event, held at the Bastide Rouge w Cannes, is behind us. The meeting was part of the T.A.B (Innovation Hubs for Tech, Art, and Business) project. Our Cluster Expert attending the event was Piotr Krężel from 24fps.pl, a producer of short films and commercials. Piotr works with visual arts daily – both in physical (Illuminations Festival) and virtual spaces (VR applications, multimedia exhibitions). Associated with film since 2007, in 2011, he founded the 24fps brand, which quickly became a leading company in the promotional and advertising film market. Since 2023, he has also worked as a producer of short films made in the West Pomeranian region.
Piotr shared with us his experiences of participating in this unique event. During the workshop, the Experts were divided into three groups. Piotr and his team: the ‘Spice Superheros’ undertook their work with incredible passion and creativity.
What task did your group receive?
– During the TAB Design Sprint, I was assigned to a group of 7 people, including film producers, feature film directors, and graphic designers. Their work can be seen on leading streaming platforms and in cinemas. Our task was to adapt a children’s book written by Olga Tsarev. The book beautifully illustrates the adventures of 3 spices: Cinnamon, Cardamom, and Vanilla. Each character has unique characteristics, and the three embark on an adventure around the world designed to introduce children to a world of diverse foods and cultures.
Our task was originally to develop an adaptation of the book for a TV series, but in the end we decided together that in addition to this we would also develop a whole brand of ‘Spice Kingdom’ – products for children that teach through play.
The Design Sprint formula involves as much time learning the creative process as the creative process itself. We had a total of six hours to prepare the entire brand concept. We were helped by generative AI models, mainly Midjourney, Chatgpt, Claude 3, pitch.com, elevenlabs and runway. We worked very creatively, using the available tools and collectively getting ‘wound up’ in the creative process. Of course, we quickly noticed that AI would not come up with anything creative for us, but it became a great tool to collaborate quickly. We quickly developed a presentation together using pitch.com – which we worked on in the cloud. ChatGPT, claude 3, eleven labs and runway allowed us to create a promotional video in an hour. It was far from being visually perfect, but I believe this will come in the years to come together with SORA-level models. Midjourney made it possible to quickly visualize ideas for additional characters and an entire world in the form of graphics. Still, here we quickly noticed its limitations: the model could not cope with such abstract prompt forms as Vanilla depicted as a princess or the creation of a spice kingdom.
What was the result and are you happy with the collaboration?
In the end, we were able to develop an extension of the entire Spice Kingdom brand to include a spice anti-hero who is the main axis of conflict in the series and became sugar, a VR/AR app for children to play with during meals, an app for ‘Collaboration cooking’ for mum and child. We also developed an idea for spice jars with interactive characters in AR, a moodboard for the VR world of Spice Kingdom, an idea for short YT videos about local food made by children from around the world. We created a promotional video about the two solutions.
Did you find it interesting to take part in the workshop?
Yes, very much so. Collaborating with professionals from Europe brought together different perspectives on the same issue. The brainstorming was inspiring, ideas came up one after another, and each one was unique and great. If we had 6 hours more, we would probably have developed the technology to improve the sound in Polish cinematography 😉
Below are pictures of the progress of the ‘Spice Superheros’ group and a link to a presentation showing the products created during the workshop. Link to presentation >>
Peter and his team have shown that creativity knows no bounds, especially when combined with the latest technologies. Their work on ‘Spice Kingdom’ is an example of an innovative approach to education and proof of how collaboration can turn a challenge into an opportunity to create something unique. We welcome the opportunity to involve our Clusters in the work of our projects.
The partnership meeting and the workshop were funded by Project T.A.B. (Interreg South Baltic).