Why we made it

Room Tone is not a client job. It's a 60-second spec commercial for the Marantz Grand Horizon speaker, made entirely with generative AI, to find out how far AI can go for a commercial that has to look like a real one. Our director Long made it in about a week.

The film

Mai comes home tired on a rainy night, drops onto the sofa and presses play. With each song her room turns into another world: a pine room in Đà Lạt with a guitarist by the rain window, a 1960s Saigon jazz club, then the Saigon Opera House with a full orchestra. At the peak of the music her mother calls up the stairs, "Mai! Xuống ăn cơm!", the music cuts, and she is back on her sofa.

The decisions that made it work

The product is on screen by the third shot. The worlds get bigger as the film goes: one guitar, then a band, then an orchestra. And they are Vietnamese worlds a foreign brand would never think to make, which a Vietnamese audience recognises at once.

The transitions are the signature. The camera circles Mai's face while tall wall panels behind her pivot like hidden doors and rebuild the room into the next world. It took three attempts to find a version that reads as craft rather than an AI trick.

The ending is the heart of it. Every Vietnamese viewer knows that call to dinner, and it turns a product demo into something warm and a little funny.

What made it hard

Making AI footage hold together like a shoot. The lead's face drifted between shots, so Long tested two versions of her and locked the one that stayed consistent. The wide shots of the room first came out looking rendered, so Long regenerated them, prompted as real photographs. The phone screens were designed as stills, because video models redraw a screen every frame. And the opera section was regenerated to match the tempo of the music.

Long edited, graded and mixed the film in DaVinci Resolve, and chose the music for each world.

Who this kind of film is for

Brands and agencies curious about AI: a concept film or a pitch in days instead of weeks, made by people who know how a commercial should be shot, cut and graded.