Spec Work · October 2026
Ten Years Later
In 2015 I made social ads for cereal boxes, waffles and toaster pastries. Each one was a shoot. Campaigns ran for weeks, and every piece was shot, edited and posted on the same day. This month I gave fourteen of them to an image model and Seedance and asked for the 2026 version. Each one cost $1.40 and a few minutes of machine time.
My favourite of the set. It's the same box and the same bowl, and a mummy still turns up for the candy. In 2015 the hand held up a sign. In 2026 it takes a treat, and the porch has fog, cobwebs and a porch light to work with.
How they were made in 2015
Real food and real product on set: the syrup pours were actually poured. I built composites and cleaned up packshots in Photoshop, animated in After Effects, and used Cinema 4D for anything a camera couldn't capture. I made about half of them alone and half with one other designer. The schedule was the hard part: shoot, edit and post in a single day.
How they were made in 2026
- I pulled the opening frame of each original.
- An image model (Gemini Image 3 Pro, through the Runway API) used that frame as a reference to make a new 2048-pixel still. $0.20.
- I approved every still before anything moved. A still costs a sixth of a video, so the framing gets settled here.
- Seedance 2.5 animated that exact still for six seconds at 640×640. $1.20.
No shoot, no set and no After Effects. The original idea and one prompt per piece did the work.
The first pass was the wrong brief
My first prompt said recreate this exactly, and it did, almost pixel for pixel, logos included. That was the problem. It looked like an upscale, and I'm not interested in an upscale. The second pass reversed the instruction:
The reference image is a dated 2015 social ad. Use it ONLY for the brand, the exact product packaging, logos, printed words and the core idea. Do NOT copy its flat composition or lighting. Re-imagine it as a 2026 award-winning campaign key visual: stronger composition with a clear hero and depth, cinematic professional lighting (shaped key, rim and back light, atmosphere), rich colour grade, premium styling...
Then each piece got a few lines of art direction, and the model began adding what the 2015 budgets never covered: backlight through falling leaves, a fog machine, string lights, a spotlight on a puck at centre ice.
The trap: it redesigns the packaging
When I told it to improve the scene, it improved the box as well. Special K came back teal. A Rice Krispies Treats carton came back reading “with all original original” and “61 squares”. The fix was a paragraph that ties the package to the reference: identical colours, artwork and printed words, with only the scene around it allowed to change.
This collection starts with the 2015 work and includes later pre-AI examples, including the Synechron 2024 holiday greeting.
The other thirteen
The originals (2015 onward) on the left, 2026 on the right. The originals keep their native shape; every 2026 version is square.
Eggo · syrup macro
The same macro, now lit from behind so the syrup glows, with a pat of butter melting beside it.
Special K · Pumpkin Spice, outdoors
Golden hour, falling leaves lit from behind, and a steaming mug.
Pop-Tarts · hot tub
The same dunk-and-pop gag, now with snowfall, string lights and a glow from under the water.
Synechron · holiday card
This original includes a New Year 2024 greeting, so it is a later pre-AI example, not a 2015 ad. The flat vector card is now a porcelain ornament on embossed paper. The wordmark drifts as the clip plays; it's the one logo in the set that didn't hold still. The greeting is missing because I didn't ask the model to write it.
Rice Krispies Treats · picnic ants
The camera drops to the ants' eye level, so the theft is clear in the first second.
Eggo · toaster
A chrome hero shot with heat glow from the slots. The web catches the waffle but never pulls it out of frame.
Allstate · tailgate
Same overhead shot, same disaster. The foam finger lands on the grill and the fireball scorches the tailgate.
William Hill · flaming puck
The puck catches fire at centre ice before it flies at the lens. The headline and end card weren't regenerated, and they're the parts a designer would still add.
Eggo · the stack
One waffle becomes a stack, with syrup running down every side.
Rice Krispies Treats · Season’s Treatings
A bigger moon, the holiday pack as the hero, and fairy lights along the roofs.
Rice Krispies Treats · Band Practice
Stage lighting and a drumstick that keeps time. The original tells a four-scene story (Band Practice, Study Hall, Soccer game, Whenever!), and that doesn't fit into one generated shot.
Nutri-Grain · real strawberry
A juice-splash freeze-frame, with the caption locked in place. The original ends on the bar pack; this one doesn't.
Special K · jack-o’-lantern
Candles and fog now do the job the After Effects glow did in 2015.
What didn't make it
An Eggo spot with a Mickey-shaped waffle and Mickey's gloved hands is missing. Moderation blocked every attempt, even when Mickey was never named, because the reference frame itself is Disney art. Licensed characters are still off limits. The Rice Krispies elves taught the same lesson from the other side: describing them in the prompt got blocked, but leaving them out and letting the reference image carry the box art worked.
What ten years changed
| Lighting is free | Backlight, haze, fog and string lights used to mean a bigger shoot day. Now each is a sentence in a prompt. |
| “Better” has to be asked for | “Recreate” gave me a copy. The upgrade came only after I told it to ignore the old composition. |
| Packaging needs a lock | Without one, it redesigns the product along with the scene. |
| One shot, one beat | Multi-scene stories, headlines and end cards don't come out of a single six-second generation. |
| Characters are walled off | Disney art was blocked outright, and so was describing the cereal mascots. |
| Text mostly holds | In my one-frame-per-second spot check, thirteen of the fourteen logos held through the motion. The Synechron wordmark drifted. |
The receipt
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 14 faithful stills (first pass, thrown away) | $2.80 |
| 14 reimagined stills, Gemini Image 3 Pro | $2.80 |
| 3 redos to lock the packaging | $0.60 |
| 14 six-second videos, Seedance 2.5, 640×640 | $16.80 |
| Total, 14 finished ads | $23.00 |
Billed through the Runway API, where one credit is one cent. Moderation blocks aren't billed, so the four blocked attempts cost nothing. Stills take about ninety seconds for four. Videos took about four minutes each, rendered one at a time, so all fourteen finished in just under an hour.
The verdict
In 2015 one of these took a shoot, a designer and After Effects, all on deadline for the same day. In 2026 it takes $1.40 and a few minutes. But notice what the machine didn't do: every idea on this page comes from the original work. Pop-Tarts in a hot tub, ants stealing a treat, a mummy at the candy bowl. The AI rebuilt the craft around concepts it was given. It also needed someone to say “that's an upscale, not an upgrade”, to catch a cereal box it had quietly redesigned, and to pick the one worth leading with. Production got cheap. Judgement didn't.
Credits
I worked on the original social pieces featured here with Jon DeFreest and Cody Johnston.
The originals are social work I collaborated on from 2015 onward; the Synechron card includes a 2024 greeting. The 2026 versions are unofficial spec recreations made for this article. They were not commissioned, approved or endorsed by Kellogg's, Allstate, William Hill or Synechron, and all brands and trademarks belong to their owners. Prices are an October 2026 snapshot.