How Blair Vermette Went from AI Skeptic to a Pioneer of Viral AI Videos

0:00Hi, my name is Blair. I am the founder of Rabbit Hole. You probably may have seen my spec ad that I did for Adidas called Floral. and I am obviously immersed in AI now. I absolutely love it. And I feel like this is just, we're literally just at the very beginning of this. And yeah, I'm absolutely excited about what's to come. So probably a good place to start, Larry. If you don't mind, kind of just tell a little bit about how you got introduced to Gen AI and what you kind of thought was important for you to kind of like do with it. Okay, well, I think I have this pretty well rehearsed at this point.

0:44I come from the world of television. I am creative in my spirit and in my abilities and through and through, I always erred on that side of the brain, wherever that rests. I worked in television for approximately, and this is in the Canadian landscape, by the way, we should probably establish that. So working in Canada in television, all the major broadcasters over here for a good 15 years, I would say. And at some point had this concept for a TV series that got picked up by Ovation in the US, which is California based channel. and I took that opportunity to start my own production company. And then that went on for about 11 years and then the pandemic came.

1:34And that was a full stop, I think, for a lot of us in the creative industry, a time to reflect and try to figure out, well, what do we do now? And you guys know, like, you know, marketing budgets and TV dollars and all that stuff just gets squashed in times like that. So I decided to go freelance and I started to go back to my roots of directing and producing. And in late 2022, I started to see the beginning of generative AI start to come out. And of course, my curious creative mind started to mess around with it. And my actual initial reaction to it was one of anger and frustration. I feel like I'm always fighting the two sides of me in that it's like politically motivated, capitalism motivated.

2:26Technology sometimes has such an impact on us as people and then impacting jobs and creating. And in this particular case was going to, I could already see the writing on the wall and that's 2022, which is a lifetime ago in AI. So I always say I had my eat, pray, love moment, you know, swelling, tears and anger. And I was just like, like these guys don't give a about how they're impacting people. It's just the mighty dollar is going to just bowl over industries of people that have been working away at their craft to contribute to their creativity. And, uh, you know, I had a couple of days of that frustration, but then when I woke up one morning and wiped away the tears and I realized like, this is not going back in the box.

3:09uh and so i do what i always do and i just started to you know i i always have a technical ability i think to take things on and learn them so i i decided to investigate and be curious and i started to play around with the tools and as you can imagine at that time it was very we all know that ai in 2022 early 2023 was very um not effective uh very soft looking very slow everything is very slow motion a lot of artifacting you know it wasn't very good but i think someone in my situation it's the holy grail because i am a storyteller and i have the ability technically i come my background as an editor allowed me to suddenly look at what these tools could do and for someone like me it just opened to my world of possibilities do you remember you obviously now well known on the kind of gen AI internet because you've done a bunch of videos that has really blown up and so kind of curious both to go through some of the more practical tips and I think we can go a little bit nerdy and talk about like how you create consistency and stuff like that but maybe to start with talk us through the moment when you went from just playing with a toy to kind of like when holy moly, this might actually become big?

4:35Well, I think for me personally, yeah. So there is a popular software that it's a image or text to video tool called Runway. I think everybody knows about Runway now. And I think they were kind of leading the way at first with being able or allowing people to be able to create videos from images. and in the early days they were creating like uh film marathons that basically would start on a saturday morning and end uh on the monday morning needed to be submitted and what they would do is give you sort of three categories that you had to choose from and then you had to create uh using runway and then using mid-journey for images at that time and i think for me that was the first that was the beginning of everything because i created a cartoon called my name is gary and the story it was the story of this um alien that lived amongst us that essentially is uh alienated by people but i think the underlying sort of message when i put that together was like as he looked around he was like you know i'm you know you got i'm treated as an alien i'm treated as a monster but when i look around at the way humanity treats each other really the monsters are all around us like i'm the least invasive monster that there is and i'll be honest with you man it was like a it was a uh i woke up i was i was committed to it i signed up saturday morning i was like going to do it but i got but i drank a lot on the friday night so i got hung over and when i woke up on saturday i looked at my girlfriend and i was like laughing because i'm like oh wow so i really timed this out very well and but saturday during the day i decided you know what, I'm hung over anyways.

6:17So I just sat with my laptop. We had the TV on the background. I started messing around with Majority and the ideas started to come. And so the span of that Saturday, suddenly Gary came to life. And it was crazy because it's the extension of where AI, I think, took hold for a lot of us is that the reality of it, the tangible imagery, it starts to actually, the things that you're conjuring up in your head, you can start to see it come to life in front of you. I think that's an insatiable thing for those of us in this world to be like, I cannot do this otherwise. I cannot hire a team of animators to do this kind of stuff.

6:52And so suddenly Gary started to come to life on that Saturday and I was like, oh, and as I sobered up and drank more water, I was like, oh no, this is actually happening. I have to commit now. And I kind of went all in and it was obviously a very long Saturday night, a very long Sunday night. And then I put, my name is Gary into the ether with the rest of the competitors. And, um, I came out as a finalist and, uh, that was it. I was hooked at that point. Can we just one comment that I just wanted to touch on briefly. You said, I cannot do this otherwise about, you know, having a team of animators.

7:31I think there's something to finding the thing that you can't do otherwise that's kind of cool why could you not hire a team of animators otherwise what are the constraints the real constraints for you blair that saturday that made you feel like this is enabling something that i couldn't do before well i think with traditional production in any format is going to require dollars big dollars and if you're going to do any kind of animation at a high level you're going to need a lot of dollars animation traditionally is it's very expensive um and the immediacy of me building a story in front of me the way that i was able to do it is what i'm referencing right now that i was legitimately creating an animation that that is high quality uh albeit again go back to this was 2023 at the very beginning go back to that and recognize that uh ai at that time was very slow right everything just felt like slow motion but i could still get gary to who had facial expressions i was still able to animate the people around him and stuff like that that's an impossibility it's not something where it's not that i would not have loved to produce an animation prior to that but i just didn't have the resources nor a contract in place to be able to do something like that for those who don't know movies at all when you say it requires lots of dollars like what's the scale if you were to if you were to commission a team of people to create gary from your mind the way you were able to do it that Saturday, hung over on your couch with Mid Journey.

9:03I mean, somebody who literally knows nothing, is it a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, 10 ,000? What are we talking? Just like the animation that I produced? Yeah. Or like a full animation production. Well, whatever you were thinking, I can't do this otherwise. What is that level of investment? I mean, to that extent, what I was able to produce with Gary I think the video is about a minute long at that higher level I would say so typically I own a production company what I would need to do to access a budget and get a better sense of the cost of it I would need to get in contact with an animation company to have them cost it out so if I had to just take a rough guess probably at a high level$50 ,000 $100 ,000 easily but again let's Talk about the nuances there.

9:53What I was producing was very slow. It was very done in slow motion. And so I think that if I hired an animation company, a lot of it would be more the movement, the motion would be in real time. And so, you know, it would look better than what you're seeing in front of me. But again, the fact that I'm hung over on my couch and I am putting that out there and it got received extremely well that I became a finalist. Can I ask a nerdy question on how did you go about making the facial expressions kind of align to what you were imagining? Was that literally just prompting a different way? Like, you know, the character will now smile in a quirky way kind of thing?

10:37Yeah, a lot of it is prompting. And Henrik, you and I, I think, have had this chat. I think the thing about AI that everyone has to understand is that the AI is not controllable 100 % and never will be. Well, actually, as we refine the tools, they're becoming more and more so. It's just like a person, right? If you had an intern or you had a junior production assistant, no one would even think to say of their production assistant, they're 100 % controllable, right? The fact that we even have to specify that about an AI, it's kind of interesting, right? Because it speaks to how much we think about it as software rather than intelligence.

11:13Yes. But I don't think about any other intelligence. We would even, we would specify that it's a benefit, that it's perfectly controllable. I know. I know. So then we get into scary territory, but the thing about the AI is that what it does is this is the way I look at it. The AI will, you, you do your best to prompt and create based on your ideas. And so it's prompting in itself, guys is a craft of learning what are the proper words, how can you visualize things in an AI language. So that's a whole other craft in its own. But what you do is you work the crafting of the prompt over and over until you start to figure out, oh, this seems to be landing much closer to where I want to be.

11:56And so the AI is understanding this language model that I'm using now, or the way that I'm sentencing this, structuring it, it seems to understand this better. So it's, it's a lot of repetitive work at trying to figure out what the prompting is, but as it spits out the animation, it's unpredictable. And so what, what AI always does is it gifts you. And I always tell people this, and certainly when in a commercial world, when I'm working with clients, I said, you have to be prepared for what will happen is that the AI will gift you. It will gift you imagery. It will gift you a scene that you didn't exactly ask for, but it delivered it to you.

12:33And this is the really becomes now about curation. So people always talk about creators. I always call it curators because it's about learning how to take what the AI is giving you and then figuring out how do I now use this gift that's given me this beautiful. And there's a moment like in Gary, you can see it where, um, Gary's dog, which is an alien animal is kind of like, you know, he's, I didn't ask him to sort of look down and he's panting. I did ask him to pant, but he's looking down, but he looks down, but he kind of looks up and then he looks back down again. And it's like, you know, someone might say, oh, I don't want the dog looking down, looking up, but I'm like, but that's a moment to like a shy dog is kind of excited, but he's looking, you got like, he's bringing their, the AI is bringing him to life in a different way.

13:16And that's where I feel, um, you've got to be able to see the goal that it gives you. And you need to be able to be malleable with your storytelling. So wait, but what it just, just to dive into that example, because it's super interesting is what I'm hearing. Correct. Blair, that when the AI gifted you that sequence, you actually hadn't had in your mind, dog looks up, down, up, et cetera. But then once you receive that gift, instead of saying, I didn't do what I wanted, you go, Oh, maybe it's looking at something off screen. What's happening that caused the dog to look up. And all of a sudden there's a collaborative dynamic.

13:53You could say that emerges. Am I hearing that? Yeah. That's a good way to put it. A hundred percent. I love the idea of curation, especially because to me, I think the difference between create and curate is that they conjure different things. They are both creative acts. Can you talk about how you cultivate a curatorial attitude or how, how do you build your curation muscles and instincts? I mean, that's a, that's, I think that's a good question. I think it's a complex question because I think a lot of the storytelling that I do is based on instincts. You know, I know a lot of people are asking me for, they're interested in getting a course on how I built Adidas.

14:36Could you also like just quickly maybe tell the story about Adidas? Cause I think obviously it is something that made you very famous and people might not have connected your name to a spot they probably seen on the internet. Yeah, let's use Adidas as the case study. So Adidas came out of me feeling like I had been doing a lot of, I've been starting to garner some attention on LinkedIn and feeling like there was a lot of curiosity around AI. and it's interesting because and i'll just add this tidbit first when the pandemic hit and i went freelance i feel like i have a good portfolio of work that i've done with my production company and as a director and i was out there pounding the pavement to make myself available as a director and getting very little in return in terms of people that were interested and on the other side of the fence while i was messing around with ai and starting to put out gary and starting to explore and put out, you know, just sharing things that I was playing around with.

15:38The interest was growing very quickly on that end of things. So the instinct for me right away was that the appetite for AI is huge. And as an individual that is not getting a lot of work at the time, and suddenly you're getting a lot of interest, like, I mean, ask yourself, you know, the fork in the road, what direction am I going to start pushing into and where am I going to start spending that time. So naturally I started to push more into AI, but I was always going to do that because as I look back now to me, it's just, it was becoming everything for me in terms of what it was allowing me to do.

16:10Um, so then at one point I was looking at, uh, there was an ad put out by Dave Clark and it was a perfume ad and he just did such a good job of it. And Dave, Dave's always He's had such a strong, Dave's well-known in the AI industry now. I think everybody knows who he is. But he's always had such a great instinct with cutting, similar to my style of cutting. There's an awareness to cutting to beat, making it very succinct. And his ad made me realize, like, you know, I haven't put out an ad yet. And, you know, I do work in the commercial world. So I feel like it's time for me to flex a little and show off what I could do in that space.

16:54the direct line for me was adidas is my favorite shoe um and so i'm going to use that i was inspired by this idea of floral uh david used floral in his ad so you know a bit of a cheat there because i saw dave's spot i was like i love floral so i was like i married the two in my mind and it all started with a the song that i used by megan the stallion had that japanese hip-hop fusion feel to it and i love the track so it started with the music so even though i wanted to do an ad it has to start with the music but wait just to be clear here blair because i'm i'm a representative of our audience where i i'm not familiar with the backstory here you commissioned yourself yeah okay yeah i mean i was it was time for me to put out a spec ad and start to really show what I could do on that end of things.

17:51And so for me, it was, and I think these things float all the time. And you'll probably notice that in your own lives. It's sometimes they just converge at some point because they're just floating. So I see Dave's ad. I see, I think Floral is beautiful. And then the track, that track was really hitting me. But the production has to start with the music. A hundred percent always. And this is another thing that I think a lot of people don't necessarily go into creating something with that point of view. but you can see when you watch that ad it is the music that takes you that really takes you on this journey and i think for me like you know and obviously during blair's to um humble to mention this but like it blew up right like this ad was everywhere for like a whole ai internet cycle um and it was like definitely the thing that kind of brought you know me to the attention that to you um when did you kind of like start to like was it immediately that it kind of blew up or was it kind of one that those that kind of like simmered for a little bit and then suddenly it picked off uh i would say it was the first couple of days i got some really good feedback uh so i was like you know the ego was getting was getting filled i was excited like everybody would be right and i was like i started getting followers and stuff like that but it didn't really hit me i think until my LinkedIn, uh, overnight, my LinkedIn, you know, you see the little brackets with numbers, right?

19:19Yeah. Knowing that suddenly like you hadn't checked your notifications, the brackets, suddenly the brackets that I had put out on, I had then shared it to my Instagram, same thing, brackets, but big numbers in it. I was like, what the F is going on here? Excitedly. Uh, and it's, it started, I think at first with a lot of feedback and then. And then a lot of inquiries just started to follow. And I really did not understand what was happening genuinely. And then I think when I started to catch up with that, I started to realize like, I am not professionally represented here. I had already started rabbit hole as a brand that in my mind at some point, hey, man, if AI keeps going this way, maybe this is my second 2.0 with a company.

20:04I'll build an AI company. I'll start to build a studio. I'll start to do some AI work. It gives me a chance. I've always been an entrepreneur. So it's just the natural instinct for me to build a company. AI is growing. I'm getting some interest, but then rabbit hole looked like it was a bag of shit. There was nothing there. The website looked like nothing, uh, very unprofessional looking. And so I had to suddenly, you know, put on my best suit and start to treat this with the respect it was getting. But I'm, I'm shocked guys. Like what Adidas did to me, I think to this day, I'm still, it's still a bit of a head scratcher to me.

20:41Like, I think it's a great piece. What was the pragmatic or tangible when you talk about, you start getting inquiries, like tell for folks who don't know about the rabbit hole and the business, what happened as a result of that piece that you self commissioned either both with Adidas and then beyond? I started to get inquiries. I think agencies came first, which blew my mind because I thought for sure at the higher level of commercial work that agencies were not, not only were they not looking at it, they just weren't touching this stuff with the 10 foot pole. When you hear about concerns around legalities, it's just a quick assumption that a brand attached to an agency is not going to want to have anything to do with AI at this point, at this stage, but the agencies came and both for representation and both for war commission right away.

21:32And you got to remember, man, like it was arid. Like I am not getting the work. I'm not getting a lot of work at that time. And suddenly to get this influx is, uh, you know, excitable at first, very excitable, um, bubbling at first, but I didn't know what was coming. This was literally like the first small waves that were coming in. I didn't know it was a tsunami was going to come. And I do feel like there is a blessing for me in that. I feel like this isn't all about a quality video. I think that there's timing and luck that comes with a lot of exposure. If something goes viral, it's, it's kismet.

22:10There's something that happened that all converged at the same time that exploded something. So I feel very blessed that it just got shared. It got exposure really quickly. And so I'm just a lucky guy. Like I'm fortunate. How many views do you think is this is kind of gathered by now? Um, I don't really know. It's funny because on YouTube and my Instagram, the numbers aren't that extremely high, but someone else shared it on Instagram. He had the headline to it saying, Controversy Adidas does full ad in AI. And so I wrote him personally and I said, hey, dude, I feel like you're just stirring up some negativity here.

22:50Because you could see a lot of the people in the responses were upset. This really bothered them. But he was just trying to create, stirred it up in the headline. And I wrote him and I said, hey, dude, like, A, this is not, Adidas had nothing to do with this. This is a spec ad. It's clear like it's a spec ad. I don't want to get into any trouble with this. It's just me messing around. Spec ads have existed since the beginning of time, since the beginning of marketing. I was like, so I just created a spec ad. So it's not Adidas. And I said, also, would you mind crediting me and putting my name on it?

23:17And, you know, he came back negatively on that and was like, why would I do that? I'm not pretending to be you. And I was like, okay, that's good. I appreciate that. I said, but you know, you're, you are enjoying the fruits of my labor here and your account is doubled and tripled and quadrupled since I'm like, would you not want to credit the guy who's kind of helping you balloon? And he's like, well, we'll see. Like I'll give you credit in three days or whatever. So his, that video on his account has got 10 times the views that I received. And it's because it got shared by an Instagram account that has close to 2 million followers.

23:53That's why that blew up. So you can imagine had they shared it from me that a lot of that would have come. This may or may not be interesting. So feel free to say if it's not, but you mentioned a tsunami of demand and you mentioned that things were arid and to use kind of like the nature metaphor, I know that when the ground is dry and there's a lot of rain, most of the ground can't absorb it, right? Because it's so dry. Can you talk for a second about what did you do in terms of organizationally to scale up to meet demand. And specifically, one thing I'm curious about is how do you start to cultivate that curatorial mindset in other people and build the skills of a team that you're building to service the demand that maybe came in?

24:35Again, I don't know if that's a legit question or not, but that's on my mind. It's like, it's one thing for you to do what you know how to do. It's another thing to start to grow others who can replicate and meet the demand. That's a great question, Jeremy. And I think I'm trying to figure that out still now. And it's like six months later adidas is still people are still reaching out to me because of adidas and to answer your question i think there are two approaches you look for as these contracts come through um or as the inquiries come through direct to brand or agencies um a lot of it is an inquisitive point of view first of all they're approaching you from just an inquiring point of view you don't get everybody just coming saying hey we want to do something with you here's a contract, let's go.

25:18I was fortunate with BarkBox that I was able to cultivate a relationship quickly and we decided that we were going to move ahead together. And as a result, we have a great relationship. But that's not everybody. And a lot of it is they just want to test the ground. They're not sure. A lot of people are confused. They feel like they're so excited by what Adidas is, they want an Adidas for their product. And that's everything from diapers to furniture, to cars, to whatever. I've been approached by so many different brands. but in terms of how do i like i i'm i am currently overwhelmed right now and i am trying to accommodate um trying to figure out how to grow rabbit hole accordingly i'm in a chicken or egg situation henrik and i have spoken about this i am in a situation where the contract needs to come it needs to sign the money has to come then i have to put forth and go and seek out the people that can do the work.

26:11And at this stage, because it's early, I still feel like there are a lot of people, those of us that have committed that are at a high level of doing quality work, it's still a small lot of people. I feel like that will change over time, but you can imagine the people at the top of their skill level in AI, they are busy. They're inundated. So I'm just another guy trying to reach out to them saying, Hey man, I got a project. And they're like, yeah, get in line. and that's honestly their reaction they're like bro amazing man like tell me a bit more about it and they're the ones that are really good because they're in demand they're asking they have a price tag attached to them i have a i'm in a situation of like do i look for people that are showing a raw talent they're hidden gems with no exposure do i build that team out that's a master class that sounds arrogant but that would be my version of my master no it's I'll just say it differently, maybe that sounds better.

27:07Do you want to take on apprentices, apprenti, right? Basically. Right. Yeah. So this is the question I'm dealing with right now is do I build a rabbit hole team and impart what I know as best as I can, obviously I'll oversee everything, or do I continue to go after those that are well-established, that give me less headaches and a peace of mind to be able to take on a project and I know they're going to deliver on it. And currently at the forefront, I've started with people that are very talented. And, you know, some of these projects are starting to come through now. Maybe just to riff on that a little bit, because I think it touched a bunch of things that we normally talk about in this podcast.

27:46If you were to hire an apprentice, what do you think is the skill that makes somebody capable and with high potential in this field? Henrik, I knew you were interested in applying. like i could tell i knew this is this is something and and what and what email should he send his and then also i'll provide the email at the end henrik for you uh good question i feel like the people that were in production that already had a skill in editing um we have a term called predators it sounds kind of bad but predator is a producer editor people that can handle that understand a story have the technical know-how to then work with music and massage images into building a story properly can can can conjure up story in their brain i think those are the people that are best established to do really good work right away i think in in terms of instinct so i think that you can already see it i think in video in in some of the ai work that's going out that some of the stuff that just looks so slick, just so well put together that for me, it has to be something that tweaks me.

29:01That's not just catching my eye, but I feel like there's something they did there that I'm like, oh, that's, that is such a novel way of doing that. That's such a different approach. That's such a, what were they thinking when they did that? I want to be tweaked too. Like I want to be able to, to be surprised by stuff that people are putting out. And I feel like that is so cool. The way that they thought to put that approach or thought to put that together, or they have such a keen eye for imagery and how to use the AI to put the elements together to suddenly put something beautiful in front of them.

29:36So I think it's pretty natural that you'll see people that are naturally at a higher level. But to add to that, I think that there are artists that are good at crafting, but then I feel like there are those that also understand, and certainly in my industry now, when I'm dealing with clients, There is a professionalism attached to the person that can also do the craft work. Someone understands the needs of clients. They understand that they need to respond to what the clients need. So they have a response to that. They know how to address this stuff professionally. They know how to put a creative brief that looks.

30:07Because here's the thing about the industry. Even though the industry is starting to adapt AI and they're very interested in it, they still have the same pillars in place in terms of how do you approach the client? What do they require? And usually they need a proper brief that has a proper breakdown. They need to visualize it. They need to see how this is going to look. So a true storyteller is going to have all of that and be able to tell that story both on paper and then be able to deliver. You don't pick a lot of technical abilities when you mention your list of potential apprentices. Like, I agree with you, but it is fascinating that it's storytelling.

30:44It's professionalism. You know, like it's a bit of grit, right? But it's not necessarily the ability to write Python or to understand how to set up like a 3D rig. Whether or not they are avid in being able to use animation software or open source, it's going to show in their product. I think the product itself has to stand. At the end of the day, no one gives about what's in ketchup. They just love the taste of it. And I think that that's important. them when I'm looking at that visualization and it goes back to my original point of like, if there's something in there that really got my attention and I'm like, how did they do that?

31:22To me, that will be likely there was an experimentation of tools that they use. And hey, man, I would love nothing more than to bring someone on that I can work on on a project with. And perhaps I learned along the way as well. For somebody like myself, who is not an animator or an illustrator, but like to tell stories, where would you go to kind of like just get your feet wet at doing some of this thing or it doesn't require that you have a background as a predator or i mean i think there are plenty of people that are providing courses i think if you need the that general 101 i think there's a lot of ways to do that if you don't want to spend any money go to youtube it's all there if you just want to learn the tools at some point instinct has to kick in we're not all good at things like i guarantee you I can get a saw and some hammers and I could start doing some carpentry, but the instincts, the end product of that carpentry, you know what I mean?