In A24’s first blockbuster war film, Civil War, director Alex Garland begged the question “What If?” What if the United States fell tomorrow, what would your world look like? The campaign needed to be personal in order to be impactful, and needed to align with A24’s generally playful marketing angle, rather than skewing too visceral. Like children playing war, we wanted our audience to consider what they would do and who they would become if America fell, and so the creative wrapper of the little green army people was born.
We created a first to market generative AI microsite that allowed users to upload a photo of their faces and a custom description to generate a one of a kind green army person version of themselves. Our team of strategists, creative directors, and designers worked to fine tune our image generation model using the custom image dataset that we meticulously created from our original creative assets. Our in-house team created 3D models of each of the film’s four leads, imagining what they would look like in green army person form, and used said models to train our algorithm and refine output quality.
In training our AI model for the microsite, our creative and strategy teams had to hone their creative teaching skills in order to guide the model to recreate the details we were looking for. Similarly, in building our out of home ads that imagined what various major cities across the US would look like in the midst of a civil war, we implemented intricate prompt engineering to help us achieve a strategic and intentionally dystopian creative vision of America.
We contextualized the fragmented country on socials through custom motion, sound design, and AV assets. Not only did these pieces help add clarity to a plot point that was intentionally left undefined, it gave viewers an opportunity to understand the many factions in order to determine what side they’d be on, if any. These assets, alongside the social shareable generated by our microsite, encouraged, continued and rounded out the “what kind of American are you?” conversation on socials.
With a first to market generative AI microsite, dystopian out of home art, and meticulously crafted creative content that added a new layer of appreciation and understanding for the film, we accomplished our ultimate goal of generating notable social conversation and press coverage that led to A24’s biggest opening weekend to date.
