A blockbuster in the delivery world
AI production with PORTAL studio
One of the first fully AI-made spots on Russian TV: a Magnit Delivery courier rides a friendly fairy-tale dragon over 19th-century St. Petersburg. Fifteen seconds of airtime backed by three weeks of production, around seven hundred images and more than a hundred video generations. A PORTAL studio project: ZDES Digital ran the characters, scenes and shots together with PORTAL’s AI artist.
01
A fantasy blockbuster teaser
The spot plays like a blockbuster teaser: a flight above the clouds, the dragon banking, the courier over a fairy-tale city and a hard cut to the promo. PORTAL’s team drew the storyboard, setting shot sizes and the story; the exact angles were picked from what the generation delivered.
02
A dragon and a courier that never change
The hardest part of an AI spot is consistency: the dragon and the courier have to be the same in every shot. This was before tools that hold a character from frame to frame, so we trained our own Flux LoRAs for them — a twelve-image dataset from different angles with a shared trigger that tells the model these are our characters. Part of the dataset below.
03
Three hundred takes, fourteen approved
The dragon had to feel kind and alive: red scales, big wings, a friendly face. Production produced more than three hundred pose variations; fourteen made it into the approved library the scenes were built from.
04
The branded bag, built in 3D
Viewers had to recognize the courier’s bag instantly, and generation wouldn’t have held it. So it was modeled in 3D from Magnit’s photos and reads the same from any angle and in any light. That’s how we handle a brand’s product when accuracy matters more than speed.
05
19th-century St. Petersburg as a set
Scenes were generated in two passes: the environment first, then the dragon and courier inpainted in through our LoRAs. That way the characters sit inside the city’s light and perspective instead of being pasted on top. Production generated more than four hundred shots; only approved ones went on to animation.
06
Broadcast quality
Approved stills were animated into shots: the flight, the wingbeats, the camera pushing through the clouds. We worked in short cycles — five deliveries in ten days, each building on notes from the last. The result: 15- and 10-second cuts for TV and online video at broadcast quality, rare for AI production at the time.
07
A dragon for the end card
For the end card the dragon was generated separately on a green screen so it could peek in from the edge of the frame over the brand red. Green-screen generation on the left, the frame from the spot on the right.
