Born from Nature - Essence No. 01

A 30-second spec fragrance advert for Best Perfume, made entirely with generative video. The brief I gave myself was to make a film that felt like a considered luxury product spot, with the perfume's natural ingredients shaping a calm, elemental world. I wanted to explore how far I could take a generative workflow while keeping the result grounded in a clear creative point of view. It was also my first AI advert, so the process became part of the project.

The challenge was creating luxury tabletop imagery without a physical shoot, while keeping the film from feeling like a collection of generated clips. The light, glass, liquid, and bottle all had to feel like they belonged to the same world. I also wanted to prove to myself that the workflow could support a proper piece of creative direction, not just produce attractive frames.

I built one consistent lighting language around a hard, warm beam against darkness. I described the light in studio-photography terms—how it falls across glass, where reflections land, and how the shadows behave—and turned that into structured prompts that could travel across different tools. Google Flow handled much of the image generation, while TapNow and Figma Weave helped with canvas-based work, 3D bottle positioning, and relighting. I tested Veo 3, Kling 2.6, and Kling 3 against each other for the liquid and dropper shots. After roughly 300 image generations and Photoshop cleanup, the shots were brought together in DaVinci Resolve, where everything was manually edited and graded to shape the final creative direction. The sound came from Artlist, chosen for its mood rather than a literal match to every shot.

The finished 30-second spec spot took three weeks and about $100 to make. We decided not to release it under Best Perfume's name because the visuals had not yet reached the standard we would want attached to the brand. It still became an important foundation: the lighting method, structured prompting, and side-by-side physics tests now shape how I approach every advert. A second version is waiting for the tools to catch up with the standard.

Format

30s spec advert

Generations

~300 images, ~10% keep rate

Timeline

3 weeks

Budget

~$100

Tools

Google Flow, TapNow, Figma Weave, Veo 3, Kling 2.6/3, Nano Banana Pro, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve

Edit & grade

our videographer

Sound

Artlist SFX

Status

unreleased spec, v2.0 planned.