Unilever: Global Battle of the Inches
Agency: Hot Pickle
Role: AI Production Pipeline Design & Motion Graphics
The Ambition & The Reality: Unilever wanted to roll out a highly successful regional retail strategy to their global Beauty and Wellbeing markets. The goal was to gamify store execution through a high-stakes competition running from April to July. The winning market would secure a massive, game-changing injection of Brand and Marketing Investment. We needed to launch this initiative with a powerful plenary video on a giant corporate LED screen. The reality was that the raw material consisted entirely of dry operational targets and static UI dashboards. Presenting raw data like On-Shelf Availability or Share of Total Distribution Points in a traditional corporate format would instantly lose the room. We had to manufacture cinematic adrenaline to make those hard metrics feel like a championship title.
The Craft & The Workflow: We discarded standard corporate formatting and engineered a high-octane sports trailer. We locked a strict 2.5D art direction using deep navy and neon purple to build a premium stadium aesthetic. To generate the kinetic assets, we built a highly controlled AI pipeline. We used Nano Banana to lock the exact base geometry for abstract runners and whistles. We then fed those plates into Veo to simulate the kinetic physics and particle shockwaves. Because temporal AI models hallucinate typography, we isolated the text generation entirely. We composited pure white Futura Bold natively in After Effects to guarantee a flawless corporate finish.
The animation required rapid procedural control to survive the schedule. Instead of manually keyframing the dashboard assets, we built custom JavaScript expressions to drive a procedural bar chart race. We tied the country flags to the leading edges using sourceRectAtTime math. When a late curveball added 150 words of new operational targets and doubled the timeline, our coded infrastructure protected the deadline. We stripped the random noise expressions and rebuilt the dashboard with time-based ease functions. This allowed the charts to amass data smoothly over the new audio footprint. We also built parametric alpha mattes for the mobile phone UI to instantly drop in real-world WhatsApp photos from Indonesian stores. To close the film, we linked a Veo-generated energy power-up with an extreme Z-axis camera push, firing the viewer right into the final logo.
The Outcome: We delivered a two-minute kinetic film that successfully transformed a list of retail KPIs into an aspirational athletic sprint. The coded workflow absorbed massive structural changes late in the afternoon without missing the morning delivery. It proved that treating AI strictly as a component rather than a compositor allows you to generate heavy kinetic motion while protecting rigid brand standards on a global stage.
Deliverables:
2-minute plenary LED launch film
Custom JavaScript animation rigging
Generative AI motion pipeline
Procedural UI and dashboard compositing