Three generations at the ice-cream stall
    All workCase study / 2026 · Spec spot

    A whole life told only through the moments money says yes.

    ClientMyPay · placeholder bank brand
    IndustryBanking & fintech
    Year2026
    Format40 s · 2.39:1 · 24 shots
    Spec commercialConcept & treatmentAI cinematographyCharacter castingEdit & grade

    A generic bank commercial that any bank can wear. MyPay is a swap slot: logo, colour and end line change per client, the film underneath stays. No branch, no banker, no paperwork. Just the two seconds after the payment - the face.

    The brief

    One master, recolourable for any bank

    Banks buy the same emotion in different colours. Instead of pitching four films to four banks, we built one cinematic master with a placeholder brand and showed how it recolours for KB, ČSOB, Raiffeisen or Česká spořitelna. The idea came from Ondřej Hubálek’s “Blue isn’t a flavour”: three lines of dialogue spoken twice, thirty-eight years apart.

    The first preview had one face close-up in forty-three seconds and a grey middle act. The rewrite kept the idea and changed the light: the film starts in the sun and never leaves it, and every payment is followed by the face that reacts to it.

    The only dialogue in the film

    “The blue one.”

    “Blue isn’t a flavour.”

    “It’s my flavour.”

    Spoken by a boy at an ice-cream stall. Then by the same man, now a father, at the same stall. He isn’t answering his son - he is answering his dad.

    The boy: The blue one.
    The man, now 45, at the same stall
    The film

    THE BLUE ONE - 40 seconds, no crew, no location

    Park at late summer, the ice-cream stall
    SB01 · 0:00
    The approach

    Directed like a shoot, produced like software

    Every frame of the storyboard was generated from a single look document - a style spec with lens grammar, grade and one saturated accent colour per scene. The whole cast came from one model so faces hold across forty years of story; a boy of seven, the same man at eighteen, thirty and forty-five. Characters, locations, props and the brand each got their own reference sheet, and all of them go into every generation. Nothing that isn’t locked by a sheet survives from shot to shot.

    Selected frames

    From the storyboard

    0:02 · “The blue one.”
    0:02 · “The blue one.”
    0:04 · Dad, half a smile
    0:04 · Dad, half a smile
    0:06 · £1.20 on the old terminal
    0:06 · £1.20 on the old terminal
    0:11 · Festival gate
    0:11 · Festival gate
    0:22 · The ring · £1,850
    0:22 · The ring · £1,850
    0:27 · Empty flat, enormous light
    0:27 · Empty flat, enormous light
    0:38 · Now he is the father
    0:38 · Now he is the father
    0:40 · The display returns ∞
    0:40 · The display returns ∞
    Casting without actors

    Three ages of one man, one model

    Character sheets in 3:2 from a single image model give the generations a face that does not drift. The boy, the father and the man at forty-five share the features a family shares and differ where a family differs - written down explicitly, so the model has nothing to invent.

    Character sheet - Adam at 7, turnaround and head study
    Adam · 7
    Character sheet - Adam at 18, turnaround and head study
    Adam · 18
    Character sheet - Adam at 45, turnaround and head study
    Adam · 45
    What we delivered

    A pitch you can watch, not read

    01

    Treatment & beat sheet

    24 shots, ten face close-ups, four payment inserts. Coverage rules written before the first frame.

    02

    Storyboard with version history

    Every frame kept in every version; the final pick is a human decision in the review sheet, never a script.

    03

    Four video generations

    Two 18-second passes and two 5-second inserts, cut into one split screen and one 39-second master.

    04

    Recolour kit

    Brand as a swap slot: logo, accent and end card change per bank, the edit stays.

    Full storyboard contact sheet
    The numbers

    What the spec cost, and what it didn’t

    40 sfinished master
    24shots
    10face close-ups
    0crew, locations, actors

    Two days from treatment to master. The same pipeline is now packaged as the Eden pitch pipeline and reused on every spec spot we make - the method, not just the film, is the deliverable.

    Want your brand in the swap slot?

    A spec spot like this one takes two weeks including your revisions.

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