How AI is changing work
Creative & production
Making more images, choosing more sharply.
In advertising, film and video, AI makes it faster and cheaper to produce images, variants and effects. As a result, the work shifts towards the idea, the direction, the selection and the finishing. Audiences and peers react sharply, so what works is AI that strengthens a good story, with open agreements about how it was made.
What changes
- Previsualisation, storyboards and mood films come together in days instead of weeks.
- Rotoscoping, backgrounds and cleanup are largely automated.
- Campaigns get many more variants per channel and audience.
- Whole scenes or commercials can consist of generated images, with a lot of human selection.
Where people make the difference
- The idea and the story: why someone keeps watching.
- Direction and taste: choosing what works out of thousands of images.
- Agreements with actors, models and creators about consent and rights.
How AI is already used
City history in the cinema
Say Yeah Motion Media made '700 jaar Enschede' (700 years of Enschede), a 27-minute film made from AI imagery, with human direction and a recorded narrator. The film was shown in cinemas in 2025.
INN TwenteHybrid films
Thirsa van Til and Jasper Vis are making a film with AI imagery and filmed footage, plus a documentary about that process. This lets them film scenes that are hard to arrange in real life.
Nederlands Film FestivalAI as one technique among many
In the short animated film Danse macabre, Hisko Hulsing combined oil paint, green screen and computer animation. Stable Diffusion gave the figures the texture of his painting style, after which he corrected the images himself. At the premiere in Annecy in 2026, the film was booed by audience members protesting against AI in animation.
FilmkrantGetting through the painstaking work faster
Effects studio Filmmore uses AI for rotoscoping and replacing backgrounds, work that takes a lot of time.
Het Parool via HeadlinerGenerative effects in a series
For El Eternauta, Netflix had a collapsing building made with generative AI. According to Netflix, the scene was finished ten times faster than with the usual workflow.
TechRadarA Christmas commercial in a generated world
Dentsu Creative Amsterdam and Holy Fools had KPN's cat walk through a world made entirely with AI. KPN calls it a production process that requires a lot of human direction.
AdformatieA lesson from the reactions
In December 2025, McDonald's Netherlands took a Christmas commercial made entirely with AI offline after fierce criticism. The brand called the reactions an important lesson.
AdformatieA campaign with trained characters
Amsterdam agency Aigency made a Panasonic campaign with generative AI and trained its own models to keep the characters consistent. The agency claims a substantial saving on production costs.
AdformatieSteering ads in plain language
In Google Ads, advertisers can steer automatic variants with a brief in Dutch about brand, audience and message.
Adformatie
Where the sector is heading
In a 2024 Flemish survey, 22.2% of the makers of completed projects used AI, mostly for text. Nobody reported AI imagery in the final product.
VAFResearch by Behavio into ten AI campaigns: there is no direct link between AI use and effect. Emotion determines success, AI amplifies what is already there.
AdformatieSince 2 August 2026 the transparency rules of the AI Act apply: deepfakes must be labelled visibly or audibly. For automatic marking of AI content by existing AI systems, there is a transition period until 2 December 2026.
European Commission
What a maker can do for you here
- “Make a product film with AI in which our product looks really good.”
- “Make a mood film or previsualisation of our script for funders.”
- “Make twenty variants of our campaign for different channels.”
- “Take over rotoscoping and cleanup in our post-production.”
Researched on 5 October 2026. Know a good example from the Netherlands? Let us know.