AI is set to be a game-changer for smaller-budget creative projects. But when it comes to big-budget, bespoke productions, the human touch will remain essential. And that’s not a bad thing.
In fact, the distinction could be one of the most exciting developments in our industry.
Having spent years working within technical constraints, tight deadlines and budget limitations, we understand that restrictions aren’t necessarily the enemy of creativity. They can be its catalyst. By narrowing the field of possibilities, constraints force us to make decisions, solve problems and find more considered ways to bring an idea to life.
Now, as AI and automation rapidly reshape the production landscape, we’re seeing a new set of tools emerge that can help us do exactly that — work smarter, explore ideas faster and create more with the resources available.
The challenge isn’t simply adopting new technology. It’s understanding where it genuinely adds value, where it gets in the way, and how to use it without losing sight of the creative thinking that makes the work worthwhile.
AI vs Human Creativity: Knowing Where Each Belongs
Creative production involves far more than the time spent behind a camera, in an edit suite or working through animation. There are emails, meetings, approvals, file transfers, status updates and countless small administrative tasks that can interrupt the concentration required to do great creative work.
At Producible, we’ve looked at how to reduce that friction by connecting the different systems we use, including through no-code automation platforms such as Zapier and Make.
The aim is straightforward: remove unnecessary steps, reduce repetitive work and give our team more time to focus on what they do best.
The same thinking applies to AI in the creative process. Used well, it can help us explore visual directions, iterate on concepts and test possibilities before committing to a more detailed production approach. It can be a useful starting point for creative exploration, helping us move from a rough idea towards something worth refining.
But there’s an important distinction between accelerating the process and replacing the thinking behind it.
Technology should create more room for creativity, not become a substitute for it.
Human intuition, judgement and creative direction remain central to how we approach a project. Technology is there to help us work within the constraints we’ve been given, whether that’s a limited budget, a tight turnaround or a technically ambitious brief.
The objective isn’t to automate everything possible. It’s to identify where technology makes the work better, faster or more efficient — and leave the rest alone.
The AI Production Revolution Has Already Begun
The pace of development in generative video has made it increasingly difficult to dismiss AI as a future consideration.
An unofficial Volvo advertisement created using RunwayML’s Gen-3 Alpha model attracted international attention, demonstrating how quickly AI-generated video was advancing. The reported 24-hour creation and release timeline highlighted just how much could be achieved in a remarkably short period.
For production studios, examples like this are significant. They challenge established assumptions about the time, resources and technical expertise required to create sophisticated visual content.
But we’ve seen this kind of transformation before.
When Adobe After Effects and similar desktop tools became more accessible, they fundamentally changed the motion graphics and visual effects landscape. Work that once demanded expensive hardware, specialised facilities and larger teams became achievable for smaller studios and individual creatives.
The result wasn’t simply cheaper production. It was a broader pool of people capable of producing high-quality work, more experimentation and a rise in expectations across the industry.
AI has the potential to drive a similar shift.
Tasks that once required significant time or resources may become more accessible. Smaller teams could explore ambitious visual concepts, test creative directions and produce work with a level of polish that previously sat beyond their budgets.
For independent studios, emerging filmmakers and brands with limited production budgets, that’s a genuinely exciting prospect.
However, access to sophisticated tools doesn’t automatically translate into sophisticated creative work. As production capabilities become more widely available, the ability to develop a distinctive idea and execute it with intention will become even more important.
Sometimes the Best Technology Is the Simplest Solution
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learnt while integrating new technologies into our workflows is that more technology doesn’t always mean a better outcome.
It’s easy to become caught up in what a new tool can do and lose sight of the problem you’re actually trying to solve. A process that starts out as an attempt to improve efficiency can quickly become more complicated than the original task.
That’s why we believe in approaching problems from the ground up. Understand the issue first, identify the unnecessary steps and then determine whether technology offers a meaningful solution.
Sometimes automation is the answer. Sometimes a simpler process is all that’s needed.
The same principle applies to creative production. A new tool might offer hundreds of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean we should use all of them. The brief, the audience and the idea should determine the approach — not the availability of technology.
Our experience with Fetch TV on its new brand campaign is a good example of how a considered production strategy can make a difference.
By looking at the campaign’s requirements as a whole from the outset, we were able to establish a consistent brand style guideline that informed the various creative executions. This meant we could produce assets in different lengths and formats within budget, while ensuring subsequent campaign materials maintained the same visual identity.
Rather than treating each deliverable as a separate production challenge, we built a system that supported the campaign as it expanded.
That kind of thinking becomes increasingly valuable as brands need more content across more platforms. The right combination of creative planning, repeatable processes and technology can improve efficiency without compromising consistency or quality.
The lesson is simple: the greatest production efficiencies often come from solving the problem properly at the beginning.
What AI Means for the Future of Production Studios
The next few years are likely to bring substantial changes to the way film, animation and advertising content is developed and produced.
For us, the role of technology will remain consistent: make communication easier, improve the quality of the output and give people more opportunity to do their best creative work.
For other production studios considering how to introduce new tools, our advice is to start small.
Identify a genuine problem in your workflow. Experiment with a tool that addresses it. Understand the implications for your team, your creative process and your clients. Then build on what works.
There’s no need to overhaul an entire production pipeline simply because a new technology has arrived.
Developing expertise takes time, particularly when the tools and capabilities are changing so quickly. Staying informed, testing new approaches and sharing useful learnings should become an ongoing part of studio life rather than a once-a-year exercise.
At Producible, we continue to focus on the fundamentals of design, editing and animation. These are the foundations that give the work its structure, rhythm and visual identity. Technology can help us push those disciplines further, but it can’t compensate for weaknesses in the fundamentals themselves.
That distinction will matter even more as AI-generated content becomes increasingly sophisticated.
Smaller Budgets Will Get Bigger Creative Possibilities
One of AI’s most significant impacts will be its potential to raise the production standard for projects operating with tighter budgets.
Generative tools could allow smaller advertisers to explore more ambitious visual treatments, create concepts that would previously have been prohibitively expensive and access production capabilities once associated with much larger campaigns.
For smaller brands, that could mean more opportunities to compete creatively. For production studios, it opens up new ways to deliver value and help clients get more from their investment.
But this doesn’t mean high-budget production is heading for extinction.
If anything, the growing accessibility of production tools could push premium work in the opposite direction. When more people can create impressive visuals, the challenge for high-budget productions will be to deliver something more distinctive, more emotionally engaging and more creatively ambitious.
The benchmark will keep moving.
The unofficial Volvo ad is a useful illustration of the possibilities of generative video. The technology can produce striking visuals at remarkable speed. But creating a compelling brand story involves more than generating an impressive sequence of images.
It requires a clear creative idea, an understanding of the audience, considered storytelling and the judgement to know what will resonate.
That’s where human expertise continues to matter.
As creatives, we’re naturally inclined to take on a challenge. Give us a new tool and we’ll find ways to push it further. Give us a new constraint and we’ll look for a solution. AI will undoubtedly change the boundaries of what’s possible, but it will also create new challenges for us to solve.
The result should be an industry that becomes more ambitious, not one that simply becomes more automated.
The Human Touch Is Still the Point
Keeping up with AI is a considerable task in itself. The volume of new tools, platforms, techniques and opinions makes it difficult to separate genuinely useful developments from the latest hype.
I make a point of following the changes and sharing relevant learnings with the team, but it takes genuine time and interest to understand where the technology is heading and which developments are worth exploring.
We don’t need to adopt every new tool. We need to understand the ones that can make a meaningful difference to our work.
Ultimately, the future of production will depend on finding the right balance between technological capability and human expertise.
AI can help us iterate faster, automate repetitive tasks and explore ideas that once seemed out of reach. It can lower barriers to entry and give smaller productions access to increasingly sophisticated creative tools.
At the same time, the fundamentals of design, editing, animation, storytelling and creative judgement will remain the foundation of good work.
The more accessible production technology becomes, the greater the opportunity to distinguish ourselves through how we use it.
For Producible, that means embracing the tools that improve our process while continuing to invest in the creative thinking that gives our work its value.
AI will make more things possible for more people. The real opportunity is to use that freedom to make better things.
