By mbretous@hubspot.com (Martina Bretous)

When HubSpot’s Global Events Team had its first kickoff planning session for INBOUND 2024, they weren’t sure about the creative direction they’d take.

One thing was clear though: Given how huge AI has become in the last few years, they knew they’d incorporate it somehow.

I connected with the team to learn more about the important role AI played in pre-production – from creating eye-catching visuals with Midjourney to targeted agendas with Claude.

Creating Fresh Interstitials

Prior to INBOUND 2024, the team kept the onsite interstitials pretty consistent year-over-year, sticking to static visual imagery and light animation.

It was time for a change.

Instead of graphics that would disappear into the background, they wanted to create interstitals attendees would want to engage with.

“This year, AI has been big, and we got an intro to Midjourney and the work that Eduardo had been doing with the tool,” said Sav Aaver, former HubSpot production manager who led the collaboration. “We decided to look into that to add more interest to our screens, create a new element so people have something to look at that sparks conversation, if they’re sitting and waiting and working between sessions.”

The Global Events team tapped Eduardo Garcia-Lopez, who leads HubSpot’s Visual Design team, to oversee the production of fresh interstitials with AI – leveraging Midjourney to generate flat, 2D images and Runway for video and animation.

They weren’t trying to create something net new, he says, but they wanted to push their branding.

“We didn‘t want it to feel like, ‘Oh yeah, this is very on the brand. It’s exactly what we would expect,’” Garcia-Lopez said. “We wanted to explore, because AI gives us these possibilities – you can take it anywhere you want but still maintain the same style of the brand.”

After some brainstorming, they settled on three themes:

• An umbrella theme for INBOUND, which was very abstract and closely tied to the HubSpot brand.
• An extended brand for each stage.
• A third, surreal, abstract city theme

The Creative Process with AI

From start to finish, it took the team roughly a month and a half to generate 28 final videos, with 14 minutes of run time adapted for seven screen types at the venue.

Starting with a baseline of shapes, gradients and colors that have always been the foundation for INBOUND graphics, Garcia-Lopez fed those initial images to Midjourney.

That allowed him to generate initial ideas and options to present to the Global Events team.

With AI, the person doing the prompting becomes the director, he says.

“You‘re telling the AI. ‘Here’s my vision. Now, go out and do that,’” he says, “It takes a while, but if you compare that to a team, you still need somebody to drive the vision.”

Once both …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron