AI-Powered Creative
The Animal Professors
Absurdist academia for the Reels and TikTok era.
- Creative campaign and AI character development
- ChatGPT · OpenArt · Photoshop · HeyGen
Turn AI-generated personalities into full-scale media spokes-creatures, smart, funny, and strange enough to stop a scroll cold.
The Concept
When TikTok erupted with viral Bigfoot and Yeti sightings, I saw the opening. What if we leaned into cryptid-mania but gave it an academic twist? Building on my existing photoreal AI character work, I invented the Animal Professors: a character-driven content series blending design, voice, and satire.
The goal was to turn AI-generated personalities into full-scale media spokes-creatures. Smart, funny, and strange enough to stop a scroll cold.
The Cast
Each animal had to be more than a face. It needed a persona. ChatGPT generated the names, quirks, and backstories, the services each professor sold, and the scripts, witty and irreverent by design.
Building the Faces
From ChatGPT I moved to OpenArt's Realistic Vision model to generate their visual forms, and the real challenge began. Photoreal AI is finicky with animals, especially hybrids. Flamingos would not hold together in humanoid form, so they were cut early. Hooved characters broke on the hands, so I swapped in human hands to preserve gesture, knowing the images would be animated later.
Photoshop finalized everything: reshaping limbs, cleaning backgrounds, framing vertical 9:16, and upscaling four times for HD.
Making Them Talk
OpenArt does not animate or detect subjects for lip-sync, but HeyGen does. I imported each finished character and paired it with a voice that fit the script. British for Owlington. Deep and dry for Baahker. Nutters sounded like an off-brand cartoon squirrel on three Red Bulls.
Every line ran from ChatGPT into HeyGen and was tuned for tone, cadence, and timing. The result was fully animated talking professors, each weirdly believable and ready for wherever they needed to live.
See Them In Action
Fully animated, each with its own voice. Two of the professors out in the wild:
Why It Works
The Animal Professors are weird and funny, but underneath the surreal visuals is a repeatable framework: script, image, polish, animate. It is a modular campaign built for scale, where each character can speak to a different audience, represent a different service, or carry a different message. With the right tools and the right tone, AI-generated characters can tell human stories better than most human content ever does.
How the Professors run
Each professor is a locked character, not a one-off render. Face, voice and point of view are fixed once, then the pipeline produces episodes on repeat, which is the only reason a surreal cast stays recognisable across a whole series. Retention data comes back per character, so the cast is not just maintained, it is cast-directed: the professors that hold attention get more screen time, and the ones that do not get rewritten.
Retention data rewrites the scripts. The cast gets sharper every batch.
If your brand should be working harder than it is,
I want to hear about it.
No forms. No funnels. One direct conversation.