Sampath Bank needed a television commercial for a debit card promotion — a spot that had to carry the weight and polish of a conventionally shot TVC while being produced entirely with generative AI.
The Approach
Working to director Chathra Weeraman's vision, the commercial was built without a camera, a set or a crew. Every frame — the cast, the family home, the branch exterior, the city skyline behind it — was generated, then assembled and finished like any other broadcast edit.
The Craft
Character consistency: the same two faces had to hold across every cut. Reference locking and controlled generation kept them recognisably the same people from the first shot to the last, which is the single hardest problem in AI video and the first thing an audience notices when it fails.
Brand-accurate environments: a generic glass office would have broken the spot. The branch had to read specifically as Sampath — the architecture, the signage and the trilingual Sinhala, Tamil and English lockup all had to survive generation intact.
Colour discipline: Sampath's orange runs through the whole piece, from the warm low sun to the grade, so the brand is present in every frame rather than only in the endframe.
Casting that belongs: the people on screen had to look like the bank's actual customers in Sri Lanka, not like stock footage borrowed from somewhere else.
