The brief
Blocq's ICP is UK women 45 to 58 who have already bought two or more beauty devices that ended up in a drawer. The category is loud, skeptical, and full of broken promises. The creative had to feel handmade and emotionally honest, not generated. Aardman / Laika texture, not stock motion. And it had to ship at a cadence that lets one operator iterate weekly across angles.
Approach
I built a stop-motion claymation production pipeline that runs end-to-end on AI. Nano Banana 2 handles character reference sheets, environment design, and per-shot starting frames. Kling 3 animates each shot at a 12 fps stop-motion feel with the slight judder that gives clay its character. ElevenLabs generates the British female VO in the contrarian-authority register the angle needed. Claude Code orchestrates the system: production packages, prompt templates, VO scripts, and the SOP that lets the next shot brief itself off the previous one. Two ad films delivered out of one system.
The set
Two films. The Drawer opens on a clay hand pulling open a bathroom drawer full of abandoned devices, each flickering once with the promise it failed to keep. The Cliff runs the contrarian-authority angle: your serums work on a dead layer of skin, the collapse is happening underneath, and the cost of being wrong is ten years of compounding loss. Same world, same craft, two emotional registers.
Outcome
Two ad films shipped from a single production system. The pipeline is reusable across the Blocq portfolio, which means the brand can iterate creative weekly at the cost and speed of digital while holding the texture and craft of stop-motion. Internal cost vs. an outsourced equivalent is roughly 1 / 30. The system itself is the deliverable as much as the films.
Credits
Sole creative, end-to-end: Jack Phoenix. Client: Blocq.