Soosmi Kids AI Commercial

A commercial for Soosmi, a pocket-sized AI companion for kids that lets them photograph the world around them and ask questions about what they see.

The brief

Something warm, curious, and grounded in real childhood energy, not the cold aesthetic that tends to follow AI products.

The challenge

Shooting children, like shooting animals, is one of the oldest hard problems in this business, and rightfully so. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s being a father, but I knew exactly how to handle it: start acting like a big kid yourself and turn the work into play. We cast two, a local Chinese boy and a Russian girl who spoke a little English and a lot more Chinese. Talking to both of them in Chinese and making every shot a game turned what can be a brutal day into an easy, fun one.

The approach

The shoot was hybrid. A Blackmagic Ursa Mini carried the main commercial, with Kodak Vision3 16mm woven in for texture and feel. The grain and warmth of film gave the piece a tactile quality that sat right against the subject: a reminder that the product lives in the physical world, not just on a screen. For the AI sequences, we masked and composited AI imagery on top of real footage rather than letting it drive the look, so the AI reads as wonder rather than automation.

The animations near the end were a save. We had hired a VFX team first and the results weren’t there, so I leaned on my own experimentation with AI video, and it delivered something the director and I were both happy with.

The result

The video shines, and the client was very pleased. The AI work that rescued the ending earned its place precisely because it served the cinematography instead of standing in for it.