Craft work: advertising embraces handmade authenticity as it rages against the machine
As generative AI makes polished imagery cheaper and faster, brands are rediscovering pencils, puppets, miniature sets and stop-motion.
One of the rubs of AI, as it becomes increasingly sophisticated, is that all your effort can seem like it took no effort.
The solution, it seems, is to make damn sure everyone knows what you’ve been up to.
As well as brands casually-but-pointedly labelling their posts with more detailed production notes as if to prove 'this was for real', we’ve seen a notable increase in ‘making-of’ films, as if we’re back in the era of DVD-extra material.
As a magazine dedicated to creativity, we’re here for the deep dive, but we hadn’t considered that 'show your workings' would become part of the pitch.
Levi’s 2026 Christmas campaign ‘Let's Get Fuzzy’
Revisiting the handcrafted techniques made popular in the 90s was a prime example of showing the workings.
The ad reaches back to the brand's 1995 ‘Clayman’ commercial, widely described as the first full-length commercial created entirely in claymation. But the brand and studio Blinkink didn't simply make a stop-motion film; they made quite sure we knew how laborious it was.
A six-person build team spent more than 2,000 hours over six and a half weeks constructing and painting the miniature world.
The set included three cabins at different scales and around 400 individually made miniature trees. Shooting a single second of stop-motion took around four hours.
Even Clyde's tiny Levi's wardrobe was handmade to mimic the real clothes. Animator Andy Biddle even deliberately touched the miniature garments between frames, producing the slight movement and imperfection animators call “boiling”.
With all that effort, is it surprising Levi’s took extra care to ensure we didn’t think it was something approximated in minutes by an algorithm?
Effort becomes a feature
Elsewhere, we assume, as a reaction to a world where anything can exist, Prada has picked up its pencil case.
‘Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand’ was created under creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. The campaign combines Glen Luchford's live-action photography with traditional animation led by veteran animator John Pomeroy.
Instead of generating fantastical environments digitally, Pomeroy's artists drew them all.
The preview includes hand-drawn animals, including a lynx, who takes an interest in a handbag mixed with real humans. Luchford even carefully matched the lighting and perspective of the photographed actors to the illustrations so the two worlds could coexist.
Prada's own description is revealing.
It calls illustration an “anachronistic and romantic technique” and is keen to bill the film as an ode to the golden era of cartoon making.
Pomeroy says: “There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in the human touch.”
The result is shaping up nicely, we must admit, and it’s hard not to appreciate the newfound love of the traditional: even if we fear it might be a short-lived fad before people embrace AI wholeheartedly. *Wipes tear*
Credits
Levi's, Let's Get Fuzzy
Production company: Blinkink
Directors: Stevie Gee and Essy May
Executive producers: Bart Yates and Josef Byrne
Producer: Rebecca Little
Director of photography: Toby Howell
Production designer: Gordon Allen
Animators include: Andy Biddle, Laura Tofarides, Henry Nicholson and Honor Price
VFX supervisor: John Malcolm Moore
Prada, Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand
Creative directors: Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons
Campaign creative direction: Ferdinando Verderi
Photographer and director: Glen Luchford
Animation direction: John Pomeroy
If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe for free to our weekly email alert and receive a regular curation of the best creative campaigns by creatives themselves.
Published on: