RIPTIDE Car Wash - North Carolina
Three :30 commercials. Four cities. Three shoot days. One AI-integrated production pipeline built with Higgsfield and Seedance 2.0/2.5.
Client: The RipTide Car Wash (direct)
Industry: Automotive Services / Consumer
Year: 2026
Campaign: Three :30 streaming commercials
Location: Multiple locations in North Carolina
As Director and DP and production coordinator my team and I delivered the campaign end to end: from concept development, shot design, a three-day multi-city production, and a fully AI-integrated post pipeline and workflow doing the work that traditionally requires an animation studio, a motion-graphics team, and a drone unit.
THE CLIENT
About RIPTIDE Car Wash
The RipTide Car Wash is a fast-growing express car wash chain with locations across the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia. For their first major streaming campaign, they needed three :30 commercials for regional platforms: a flagship brand spot introducing Hank, their hammerhead mascot, in motion for the first time; a talking-dog spot; and a father-and-son amenities spot.
The catch: the campaign needed an animation studio's output providing a fully animated character, motion graphics, aerial establishing shots, on a regional chain's budget and a three-day production window.
the CHALLENGE
An Animation Studio's Deliverables Without an Animation Studio
Three commercials meant three different productions at once: a brand film, an animal shoot, and a child shoot, across multiple cities in three days, with a mascot that existed only as flat 2D artwork and aerial shots of locations where drone flight wasn't realistic on our timeline.
What was at stake:
- Brand debut: New franchise locations and Hank the hammerhead who had never moved or spoken. The campaign would define the mascot on video permanently.
- The cast you can't direct twice: a dog and a six-year-old, each with a short window of usable performance and non-negotiable welfare requirements.
- Airspace: commercial drone work requires FAA Part 107 operations and airspace authorization and key locations sat where clearance wasn't happening on schedule.
- AI's known failure modes: on-screen text and precise object counts are exactly where video generation still breaks, and this campaign was full of both.
- Speed: three shoot days, then straight into an edit feeding a regional streaming buy.
The workflow challenge: integrate AI where it genuinely delivers: in character animation, storyboards, and aerials, while keeping every frame the client's brand is crucial.
the APPROACH
AI Storyboarding: Cinematographer-Grade Prompts, Client-Approved Frames
The storyboards for all three spots were generated in Higgsfield from shot lists I wrote frame by frame with cinematographer-grade prompts specifying focal length, camera height, blocking, foreground and background, lighting, and negative space.
A master context prompt locked the campaign's visual world (palette, the generic picture vehicle, uniform wardrobe, a strict no-logos rule that sidesteps AI's notorious text problems), and per-shot prompts carried the rest.
Character sheets, front, back, and profile turnarounds generated for the young actor and the father, kept the same "cast" consistent across every frame.
The result: photorealistic boards that read like stills from the finished commercial, approved by the client before a single call sheet went out. On set, the boards doubled as a shooting reference; in the edit, they were the map. AI storyboarding did not replace shot design but made the shot design visible early enough for the client to sign off on the film before we shot it.
AI Character Design: Hank, From Flat Mascot to Talking 3D Spokesshark
RipTide's mascot, Hank the hammerhead, existed as approved 2D vector art. The campaign needed him to move, talk, and share the screen with live footage, and flat art composited over photography always reads as a sticker.
The AI workflow: an image-to-image conversion in Higgsfield transformed the approved 2D design into a stylized 3D character render, which the client approved as the new animation-ready Hank.
Animation ran through Seedance with a technique I'd recommend to anyone doing AI character work: syllable-timed choreography. Rather than hoping for lip-sync, each second of the performance was scripted against the actual voice-over cadence: mouth-open windows on stressed syllables, full mouth closes written at the commas, gestures landing on specific words.
The clips were generated on pure chroma green, keyed in DaVinci Resolve and loop-engineered so idle tails extend as long as an edit needs.
AI Aerials: Animating the Client's Existing Drone Photography
The original plan called for drone cinematography, and commercial drone work comes with real regulatory weight: FAA Part 107 certification, airspace authorizations, and at least one of our locations sitting in controlled airspace where clearance wasn't realistic on our timeline.
Instead of hiring a drone unit for every city, the workflow inverted: the client supplied existing aerial photographs of their locations, and AI image-to-video in Seedance animated them, with the scene inventoried in the prompt so signage, architecture, and lettering stay locked while true camera parallax does the work.
The honest craft note: these moves are deliberately small. A photograph contains one side of the world, and the discipline of AI aerial animation is asking only for the few degrees of drift the source can support.
Within that discipline, the results cut seamlessly against live footage while establishing shots with genuine production value, with zero flight operations, and full use of assets the client already owned.
This is one of the most practical AI usage patterns in commercial video production today: not replacing cinematography, but activating a client's existing photo library into motion.
THE RESULT
Three :30 commercials delivered in 4K H.265 with 1080p streaming versions, filmed in three days across four cities, finished with a fully AI-integrated post pipeline, and accompanied by a reusable brand asset library:
animated 3D Hank performances,
the locations-map motion graphic,
an animated logo sting,
AI-activated aerials of the client's own locations.
No animation studio. No motion-graphics team. No drone unit. One DP, a lean crew, and an AI workflow doing exactly the jobs it's ready for.
Toolchain:
Higgsfield for image generation and 2D-to-3D character conversion; Seedance 2.0 and 2.5 for character animation, first-and-last-frame motion design, and image-to-video aerial animation; DaVinci Resolve for edit, color, keying, and Fusion motion graphics. Music and jingle: client-supplied, produced independently in Chicago.
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