Working with our friends at TILT, director Kess BD and Hinge Digital’s creative team came to the brief with a clear philosophy: capture the real human moments that a camera captures best, and use AI as the finishing department that makes the impossible achievable.

Kess pitched the approach that became the campaign’s backbone: give the audience one person to follow — Sana, a healthcare worker moving through a waking Los Angeles — and let the patient portraits towering above her do the heavy lifting of scale. Scale and humanity in every frame, where there is one there must be the other. The projections had to feel physically real, grounded in actual LA light, actual LA geometry. And they had to be earned — shot on location, with real camera movement and real performances as the source.

So we shot for real: real camera moves, real LA locations, real performances, real morning light wherever the schedule allowed. And we built the rest in post — relighting entire scenes from midday to dawn, integrating patient portraits built from selfies, bringing each scene to life through careful AI prompting, traditional compositing, and frame-by-frame VFX craft our team has spent years developing.

Every shot went through a still approval before any motion was applied. Every note came back as options, not a take-it-or-leave-it. The process was built so that nothing surprised the client — and so that late requests (new signage, wardrobe changes, a bus removed from a background) could be absorbed without a reshoot.

Two days. Eight locations. One window of light.

We shot over two days across Los Angeles, capturing the shots that would anchor every AI-assisted scene: Point Mugu, Dodger Stadium, LA skyline, a neighborhood home, a bus, Disney Hall, UCLA campus, and the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Every location chosen for what it could become in post, not just what it was at midday.

Our hero talent, our nurse Sana, was filmed moving through the waking city: stepping out of her kitchen, boarding the bus, walking to work, entering the OR. Real camera moves on fluid heads, handheld for immediacy on the bus. Actors encouraged to improvise and interact before action and after cut, cameras rolling throughout to capture the unguarded moments that make a performance feel true.

No portrait shoot. No scheduling real patients. Three selfie angles. Fully realized faces.

UCLA Health’s patients are the emotional heart of the campaign — but coordinating real patients for a two-day LA shoot was neither practical nor in the budget. So we built their portraits without one.

Patients provided selfies from three angles. From those, our team built fully realized portrait stills for each patient — adjusting pose, lighting, and background until each read as a studio-quality image worthy of projecting onto the side of a building. Multiple wardrobe options per patient, submitted for client approval before any motion was applied.

Once approved, we brought each portrait to life with subtle AI-generated movement — a gentle breath, a blink, the quality of someone who is present rather than frozen. The key was restraint: these are real people, not characters. The motion had to honor that.