A 60-second commercial for a luxury electric grand tourer that does not exist. Brand, car, script, voice, score, graphics and edit, directed end to end. No cameras. No car. No road.
Spec commercial · SOLENTEI 369 is a fictional brand and vehicle
00 · The brief
The challenge. Produce a convincing luxury car commercial for an electric grand tourer that exists only as a description. The film had to hold up next to real launch work: one car, identical in every shot, on a real-feeling Pacific Northwest coast road, from blue hour to sunrise.
The constraints. Sixty seconds. A fictional brand and vehicle, invented from nothing: SOLENTEI and the 369. Every frame generated or assisted with AI tools. No badges, no licence plates, no motor sound, ever. The car travels in one screen direction and the sun rises on the same side of frame from the first shot to the last.
My role. Brand, vehicle design brief, script, voice direction, score, graphics, edit. Directed end to end by one person, which is the point: the film’s calm comes from a single coherent vision, not from a production department.
The result. A finished 60-second commercial in fourteen shots, plus a chrome logo sting and an end card built as graphics. It plays like a real launch film because every decision, from the five locked sky phrases to the mix sitting at least 12 dB under the voice, was made the way a real launch film gets made.
01 · The car
A believable car film starts with a believable car. Before a single image existed, the 369 had a written design brief: a long, low fastback silhouette, one continuous warm-white light bar across the nose, a deep-amber bar across the tail, flush handles, frameless windows, a panoramic glass roof.
The paint was specified like a real option sheet: deep liquid graphite with a fine warm bronze flake that only shows when low sun rakes across it. That one decision gives the film its climax. At sunrise, the flake ignites.
Every claim in the film comes from that brief. The narration, the on-screen supers and the shots were planned from the same page, so they never disagree.
David’s own emblem: three woven bands in brushed chrome, used exactly as supplied and never redrawn. The wordmark is SOLENTEI in Marcellus capitals, widely tracked, with 369 in Jost ExtraLight beside a hairline. Type, supers and the end card are all chrome and silver on piano black. Gold was retired when the brand was renamed.
02 · The consistency system
A car film fails the moment the car changes shape between shots. Generative video drifts, so the system was built to remove every chance for drift before any motion was generated.
Seven master references. The car from the front and the rear, the driver, the cabin, and three places: the cedar house, the cliff road, the lookout. One canonical description of the car, pasted word for word into every prompt and never paraphrased. One approved keyframe per shot, made as a still with the references attached, signed off before it was animated.
No badges from the model. Small emblems are where AI garbles detail, so the generated car carries none. The emblem lives only in the graphics, where it stays clean: the sting, the end card and the key visual. Licence plates are never named in a prompt, because naming the unwanted thing invites it. The fascias are described as clean and unbroken instead.
Continuity rules. The car always travels left to right. The sun always rises on frame right. The light bars are on in every shot from S01 to S13. The sky follows five fixed phrases, in order, so the warming progression cannot drift.
Canonical subject block · used verbatim in every prompt
SOLENTEI 369, a sleek four-door electric grand tourer with a long, low fastback silhouette and smooth sculpted surfaces: a clean nose with one continuous ultra-thin warm-white light bar across its full width, a matching ultra-thin deep-amber light bar across the full width of the tail, flush door handles, frameless windows, a dark tinted panoramic glass roof, deep liquid graphite paint with a fine warm bronze flake that glows in low sun, large closed aero-disc wheels in satin graphite each with a small bronze centre dot, clean unbroken body-colour front and rear fascias, no badges.
03 · The fourteen shots
Fourteen shots in seven beats: blue hour, departure, the road, details, her, first light, the lookout. Premium car films cut every three to five seconds even when they feel slow, so each shot was rendered short, with two angles on the important beats and a spare take if one failed.
S01 · Light wakes0:00 to 0:04
Near-black. The front light bar illuminates from its centre outward and the glow spreads onto wet asphalt. Start and end frames were both made as stills, so the wake is a state change the model cannot improvise.
FixFix: if the bar ever lit unevenly, the wake could be animated in the edit between the two stills with a centre-out mask.
S02 · The house0:04 to 0:08
The car small in frame on the wet gravel drive, one house window lit, mist between the cedars. The camera pulls back and rises. Nothing else moves.
Fix
S03 · Hands on the wheel0:08 to 0:11
A slow push in on hands that stay still. Omni Flash is weak on articulated motion, so the shot list leans on what it does well: light, mist, reflections, a car gliding. Hands rest; they do not perform.
Fix
S04 · Rolling out0:11 to 0:16
Wheel height, locked camera. The closed aero-disc turns over wet ground and carries the car out of frame, left to right, the direction it keeps for the whole film.
Fix
S05 · The road from above0:16 to 0:21
An aerial drift. The car is a single bright point, its light bar the only lit thing on the cliff road. The power super sits in the corner: tri-motor all-wheel drive, silent, effortless power.
Fix
S06 · Chase from behind0:21 to 0:24
Low behind the car as the road curves into mist. The camera matches the car’s speed exactly, and the prompt states the road and its lane markings stay exactly as shown. A moving car must stay in its own lane.
Fix
S07 · Paint reflections0:24 to 0:26
Macro. Reflections of fir trees and sky move across the curved flank and the bronze flake catches points of light. The aerodynamics super runs here: 0.19 Cd.
Fix
S08 · Wheel in motion0:26 to 0:29
Camera locked to the car, road streaking below. One move only, and slow. Anything faster breaks wheels and reflections in generation, so speed is added in the edit, never asked of the model.
Fix
S09 · Through the glass roof0:29 to 0:32
Looking straight up through the panoramic roof. Rain beads tremble, fir tops slide past. The interior super runs here: hand-finished wool and ash.
Fix
S10 · Eyes in the mirror0:32 to 0:35
In the mirror her eyes glance up and settle back on the road. She blinks once. In the edit this shot is cut before the source clip’s later frames, where her eyes close and the moment reads wrong.
Fix
S11 · The window drops0:35 to 0:40
Her window lowers a few centimetres and the sound of the world blooms: waves, birds, firs. Start and end frames pin the window’s two states. This is the loudest ambient moment in the film before the sunrise swell.
Fix
S12 · The sun clears the ridge0:40 to 0:43
No car. The sun’s edge clears the ridge across the inlet and gold spills over the mist and the water. The orchestra arrives with it.
Fix
S13 · First light on the car0:43 to 0:48
Low tracking camera as the car rounds the bend, gold light sweeping the flank and the bronze flake igniting. The range super runs here: up to 690 km. This frame also became the key visual and the poster.
Fix
S14 · The lookout0:48 to 0:54
The car parked at the pull-out. She stands a few steps back from the stone wall, steel cup in hand, back to camera, watching the sun over the water. Then black, and the end card.
Fix
04 · The light
The film’s whole structure is a sunrise. Five sky phrases were locked as text and pasted into the prompts in sequence, so shot four can never look warmer than shot twelve. Keyframes were generated in story order for the same reason.
One grade across the film. Cool shadows, the warming progression reinforced from S01 to S14, soft halation on the highlights and light bars, one uniform layer of 35 mm grain added in the edit rather than generated shot by shot, and a 2.39:1 letterbox inside the 1920×1080 master. Generated grain varies from clip to clip and fights upscaling, so no prompt ever asked for it.
Wet means the road. Style words leak. An early test put drifting vapour around the car that read as engine smoke on an electric car, so mist was kept far from the car and still, and wet was scoped to the road surface only.
05 · The script
The voice went through three complete rewrites across the film’s three versions. The first script said too little. The second listed the car’s qualities: power, silence, materials, range. David’s final script dropped every specific claim and kept the register: abstract, unhurried, certain. The supers carry the specifications now. The voice carries the feeling.
Recorded as one Speechify master file in a single pass, because whole-script reads sound more natural, then split on the silences with at least a second of clean air after each line. Voice: Sophie, low, warm, close to the microphone, an elegant luxury read with no sales energy.
Before the world stirs there is stillness.
A moment that belongs to you alone.
Every line, considered. Every surface, sculpted.
Crafted for generations.
Because true refinement has nothing to prove.
True performance is not about speed, it’s about finding your own rhythm.
Solentei 369.
Beyond the noise.
06 · The mix
There is no motor noise anywhere in the film. The sound world is real recordings only: forest air, a water drip, gravel under tyres, wind at height, rain ticks on glass, a raven, distant surf, a dawn chorus. Synthetic nature sounds failed on earlier films, reading as static and noise, so every effect here is a real recording, laid in as a quiet ambient bed well below the music.
The score carries the sunrise. An orchestral Suno Pro take, felt piano under soaring strings and horns, built so the full orchestra enters exactly on the cut to the hero shot at sunrise. It ducks under every voice line, and every line was checked in the final mix: music and effects held at least 12.5 dB under the voice. Final master: 60.0 seconds, −16 LUFS integrated, true peak −1.9 dB.
The one designed sound. The light-bar tone in S01, a soft bell-like chime built in code, is the only synthetic sound in the film. An electric car waking up gets one tone, not an engine.
07 · The graphics
Every graphic was designed in HTML and rendered as vector type, then composited: the opening sting, four supers, two lines of fine print and the end card. The emblem is used exactly as David supplied it, a chrome render cut out to transparency, never redrawn. Flat single-colour traces of the emblem exist for small sizes and engraving only.
The film opens on a 3-second sting added in the final version: a light streak, the chrome emblem settling with a sweep, SOLENTEI under it, out to black before the car appears. It closes on the full lockup, timed to the voice: emblem, name, 369, hairline, tagline.
All figures are fictional, and the film says so. Two lines of fine print run in the letterbox bar: “Professional driver on a closed road. Do not attempt. Pre-production vehicle shown. Performance and range figures are manufacturer estimates.” The end card carries the honest one: “Spec commercial. SOLENTEI 369 is a fictional brand and vehicle. Concept, direction and production by David Martin, made with AI.”
08 · The pipeline
Stills were made in Nano Banana Pro, which reads a photographer’s description and holds identity across attached references. Motion was made in Omni Flash 1.1, given the finished still and a prompt that describes movement only: what moves, how slowly, what the camera does, what stays still. Each model was used for what it does best.
Three versions reached the screen. Version 1 proved the edit. Version 2 answered David’s notes: more voice, quieter effects, a score that soars. Version 3 is David’s own rewrite of the voice, a new opening sting and a tightened mix. Each round followed the same loop: watch, note, fix, re-render, keep every version.
The tools generated the material. Every decision about what stayed, what moved and what got cut was made by a director.
Spec commercial. SOLENTEI 369 is a fictional brand. Concept, direction and production by David Martin, made with AI.
Director
Creative Director · North Vancouver, BC
I directed SOLENTEI 369: First Light from brief to final render: the brand, the car, every shot, every line of narration and every graphic. A luxury commercial is still storytelling. It just needs the restraint to leave most of it unsaid.
I have spent 15+ years across video, content, brand, technology and business. In 2006 I founded DJC Media, an independent studio where I direct every discipline in-house, with a quarter billion views directed.
AI is my production crew. The idea, the standards and the final cut stay with me.
