G-Star Raw’s latest campaign uses visual poetry and deepfake technology to land an unconventional message: jeans should last longer than just one season.

Waste is amongst the biggest issues in the fashion industry, but what’s special about denim is that it can last a lifetime if you take care of it and embrace its different stages of life.

The film launched simultaneously with the ‘8 Raw Responsibility’ initiatives from G-Star Raw, and was an opportunity to show the lifespan of denim in an engaging and beautiful way: by showing it being worn through the decades.

The film follows a man from his twenties to old age, walking through the seasons of life through a monolithic maze. Time-lapse photography and dramatic cinematography signal the passing of time at a rapid pace around the man and his jeans as the elements ripple around him, revealing subtle changes to both man and denim as they are eroded by wind, sand and snow. But the man and his jeans continue remorselessly on, changed but unbowed – shining a positive light on the subtle signs of ageing and wear.

The convincing ageing process of the film’s central character was a result of VFX powered by deepfake technology. First, we physically captured all different facial expressions from the lead actor, filming him from all angles with a multi-camera set-up. We then used an AI algorithm in combination with our own proprietary software to develop a digital human that looks exactly like the main character. The different aged heads were then applied to three different body doubles - one younger, one middle-aged, and one older.

Realism, recognisability and expression are all key to making deep fake imagery believable, so some VFX magic was the final step to integrating each aged and de-aged version of our protagonist into the film. We worked to transfer the subtlety of human expression from one face to another, removing lines here and there, augmenting certain parts, and completely reshaping the head. Whatever it took to reflect all stages of life in a truly realistic way.

This was a story of a man and his jeans, and it simply wouldn’t have had the same effect if you could tell that it was different actors. While that may be acceptable in feature films, it doesn’t work when you only have sixty seconds to absorb the viewer in the story and bring them on the journey with you. With the artful application of emerging creative technology, we could craft a story about life, ageing and death that felt compelling and honest.

This was one of the first times deepfake was used for ageing in a TV commercial, and we don’t expect it to be the last. With this new proven storytelling tool, this film is just the beginning of a new era where we can craft short-form commercial creativity that tells stories spanning all of life’s seasons.