Julie Seal explains AI video for advertising through a hospital chat with her mum

Julie Seal, who is moving her agency Republic of Imagination into AI video, has used the second instalment of her column to set out the basics of the field through a bedside conversation with her mother.

In her previous column, Seal argued that AI video can be good in the right hands. This time she goes back to first principles with what she calls an explainer “that could put a nan to sleep”.

Seal says her mother has been in hospital again, and that sitting at the bedside, reciting medication names to nurses, has left her less time for work, not helped by NHS wifi. It also convinced her that the column should start with a straightforward Rory Stewart-style explainer.

She uses a test she has long applied to complicated advertising concepts and industry jargon: explaining it as if to her nan. The ‘nan’ here is her mother Jean, whose actual first name is Barbara, which Seal says confuses the nurses.

Synthetic media and the legal question

Seal opens by telling her mother that computers can now produce the photographs and videos once made for adverts, mostly less well than humans but far more quickly and cheaply. She frames the conversation as a stand-in for explaining AI to people in the industry who feel they should catch up but are reluctant to ask.

Her mother asks whether it is legal and warns her not to get into trouble. Seal replies that it is, but that the question raises real issues around ownership, copyright, ethics and insurance, which she plans to cover in a forthcoming interview with a specialist lawyer.

She explains that generative AI tools can write advertising copy and create voiceovers, with different ‘models’ producing images and video. The output is sometimes called synthetic media, which her mother says sounds like an 80s band with girly hair and baggy sleeves.

The consistency problem

The biggest difficulty with AI video so far, Seal says, has been consistency: keeping frames, scenes, characters and worlds the same throughout a piece.

She describes making a video about pigs ‘hogging’ the middle lane of a motorway, using many shots from different angles and scenes, and finding it hard to keep the same pig throughout. The aim was to show she could produce something longer and more complex, based on a concept that had been quoted at £200k to make before AI video. Her mother reacts with alarm at the idea of spending that much on pigs, and Seal assures her she is not.

A short glossary

Seal then runs through some of the vocabulary. Interpolation is AI generating in-between frames so transitions look smoother. Inpainting means changing small parts of a video, such as hands or a T-shirt, while outpainting extends a scene beyond its edges to create wide shots.

Compositing involves layering AI elements into live-action footage, and temporal consistency is about keeping visuals and movement stable over time so they do not judder. Hallucinations are the odd mistakes AI makes, prompting her mother to say she has been hallucinating, which Seal puts down to her fever.

The tools

Seal lists some of the leading names: Google Veo, Runway, Sora, Kling and Pika. Her mother asks whether they are characters from K-pop Demon Hunters, which Betsy likes.

Google DeepMind is behind Veo. Runway, Seal says, is probably the most widely used in advertising and also works as an aggregator of several models, as does Higgsfield. Sora, from OpenAI, was the model that first made the industry take notice, although it now faces plenty of competition.

Kling comes from China and many people consider it better than Western models, she says, while Pika has found favour among creators producing visual effects and short, punchy social posts.

She also mentions Arcads, which produces UGC-style videos of people talking to camera on TikTok without using real people, and ElevenLabs for voices, which she says is improving on accents after a period when everything sounded American. She has used Hedra for character work, which has also become very popular.

Her mother announces she is going to have a nap and tells Seal to carry on about tech stacks, the consistency wars and the backlash against slop. When Seal expresses surprise that she knows the hot topics, her mother blames the painkillers, but says she enjoys the AI app, which she calls “that Chatty Bee Gees app”, that Seal put on her phone, using it to name plants and to talk to. Seal concludes that her mother is an AI whizz after all.