The Spark
Retail students hear “AI” every day, but the difference between a chatbot that answers and an agent that acts is hard to see on a slide. The ask was a short film built from Paula Thompson’s “Understanding AI” deck for Retail Store Strategies — one that makes that difference legible with the sound off and leaves room for the class to argue about it.
The Craft
Every frame is felt: a miniature boutique, a cable-knit narrator, a pink glowing AI. Stills were locked to character references, set in motion one shot at a time, and played “on twos” so the motion reads like hand-animated stop-motion. Voices were designed from written character briefs and every take was checked by transcription; the edit is cut to the voice’s word timings, and every on-screen word — tags, step cards, stat cards, captions — is typeset in the edit, never generated.
Outcome
Seven chapters in under seven minutes — from the 1950s to today, from a chatbot answering “is it in stock?” to an agent that plans, acts and checks, to what happens when that agent follows its goal a little too well. It lands on the real lesson: AI doesn’t have a moral compass, so people have to write the rules. Every chapter also ships as a 9:16 cut with large captions for phones.
Pause & Predict
The film stops itself three times with a six-second question card. Pause there and take answers before playing on — each timestamp jumps the film to its card.
Pixel answered the question. What should it have done next?
Pixel is following orders. So what went wrong?
What rules would you give Pixel?
Process — 8 frames
