Portland Shop Uses ChatGPT To Tell Family Stories On A Startup Budget

Portland agency 2Player used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce the six commercials for Provo, Utah-based Storied, a family-history technology startup rebranded from World Archives, which provides access to historical newspaper content. The announcement was made Wednesday.

Storied -- backed by Charles Thayne Capital and built by former Ancestry.com executives -- wanted to tell a hundred years of family stories on a startup’s budget. The six-spot campaign with more than 3 minutes of content came to life under budget.

“We would have used our entire budget just on the creative development in a traditional process,” says Brad Hall, creative director at 2Player. “We were able to massively streamline the process. It took maybe a quarter of the budget and saved us one-third of the time, compared to traditional development.”

2Player creative employees developed the campaign. Humans wrote the initial script, but then OpenAI ChatGPT extended the main narrative into dozens of fully written family stories, while Midjourney generated archival photos and family-history records.

The agency used AI to generate the family-history images and stories of the Citrus family, featured in the spots. AI also developed all the references the 2Player team used to determine the wardrobe, as well as set direction.

2Player trained the AI by describing the story and film direction, and it gave them back the props, wardrobe and style frames that were used to build the look of the film. More than 500 images and style frames were created to guide the process.

The ads follow a quirky family down the rabbit hole of their own history, leading to a series of borderline uncomfortable but charmingly honest discoveries that morph into a harebrained musical.

Production company Droptree brought the narrative to life in a half-dozen worlds through the use of a digital-volume wall and Unreal environments.

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