Doug Looney — Creative Media Consulting

Work

Four project examples, four different reasons to reach for AI — or not to.

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Loopwell

90-second branded wellness commercial · AI director of photography, editor, colorist, sound design

The client had a big vision for their central character — a full story arc across multiple locations. What they had was a budget that, spent on traditional production, would have bought about 15 seconds in a single location. The gap between the vision and the budget was the whole problem.

Rather than shrink the story to fit the money, I rebuilt the production around AI — serving as AI director of photography, editor, colorist, and sound designer across the full 90 seconds. Every location, every beat of the character's arc that the traditional budget couldn't touch, made it into the final piece.

About $50,000 for the traditional-scope production vs. roughly 10% of that for the AI pipeline actually used — but the more accurate comparison isn't cost, it's scope. The same budget that would have bought 15 seconds of one location instead delivered a complete 90-second story across four.

Skater Zombies

Proof-of-concept trailer for an independent feature film · dir. Eileen Yaghoobian

Independent film financing has a chicken-and-egg problem: investors want to see the film before they fund it, but you can't shoot the film without funding. Traditionally, filmmakers pitch around this gap with a deck, some comps, maybe mockup stills — asking investors to imagine the movie.

For this project — a feature teaser starring real professional skateboarders and MMA fighters as zombie-fighting leads — I closed that gap entirely. Using AI, I set the scene, lit it, chose the lens, controlled the weather, and directed the real talent — without a soundstage, a crew, or a single frame shot on location.

The trailer isn't a pitch deck anymore. It's the movie, in miniature — and it's now being shopped to investors.

Over $100,000 for an equivalent traditional 3-day shoot vs. roughly 10% of that for the AI pipeline — a 90% cost reduction. But the real unlock is upstream of cost: this is financing collateral that didn't exist as an option five years ago.

And the system built to make it — a custom pipeline for prompt generation, reference-image matching, and batch rendering — didn't disappear when the trailer wrapped. A 12-hour build now pays back on every future production, whether that's this film or the next one.

The custom Skater Zombies shot-list and prompt-builder tool, mid-production
The actual pipeline: shot list, character sheets in Figma Weave, output to a watch folder. The custom-built app pulls the characters & scene plates, uses prompt builder, camera shot and character selector, then manages the batch render queue of the Golden Gate Bridge action sequences. Added bonus of estimated cost per generation.

Mercedes-Benz — Benzel Bush

Aerial coverage

A drone unit is its own production within the production — a separate operator, separate equipment, separate scheduling, coordinated on top of everything else already happening on set. Even when the shot itself is simple, the coordination overhead isn't.

For this project, aerial coverage that would have meant booking a 2-day drone unit at $3,000/day was instead generated with AI in a single day, at roughly $800–1,000 — no second production unit to schedule around, no separate crew to coordinate on set, just detailed pre-production conversation to get quality source material.

$6,000 for a traditional 2-day drone shoot vs. ~$900 for the AI pipeline — about $5,100 saved, and one less moving part to manage on a busy set.

PAL Football

Season-long volunteer production for a youth football league

Not every project calls for reinventing the pipeline — sometimes the win is running a full production end to end, and knowing exactly where a shortcut belongs.

For this volunteer project, I ran the complete season's coverage: game-day shooting across multiple games, full post-production, and a graphics package — the kind of start-to-finish production management that a league with no production budget still needs someone to own.

The football was real, the kids were full of energy and often gloriously silly, and no AI tool was going to improve on either — the job was just to capture it well.

Where AI tightened the pipeline

Adobe Creative Cloud's Firefly-powered workflows were layered into post, trimming roughly 10 hours of manual labor out of the editing and graphics process across the season — freeing up more time to spend on the parts that actually mattered: the kids, the plays, the moments.

Not every project needs to be rebuilt around AI. Sometimes the win is knowing exactly where a shortcut fits into a pipeline that's already working — and where it should just get out of the way.