A director revived her shelved AXE pitch as an AI spec, and it doubles as a demo for her employer
Cassandra Brooksbank remade a 2021 AXE pitch as a 60-second AI spec on Absurd, where she now works. Her plan-first method transfers, but no cost was disclosed and the film shows no spec label on screen.
Cassandra Brooksbank pitched an AXE commercial in 2021: a young man in a huge orange puffer jacket squeezes onto a packed New York subway car, and the jacket swells with his sweat until it bursts. She says the job was shelved for budget reasons. This month she made it anyway, as a 60-second AI film called For Days That Run Hot, and wrote up exactly how on No Film School. Swipe for 20 seconds of it, sound on.
She ran it like a live-action job. The treatment and storyboard came first, and the boards took under a day instead of most of a week. She locked about 20 commuters, the jacket at each stage of swelling and a seating plan for the whole car before generating any footage, because, in her words, AI "has a notoriously terrible sense of geography." The footage came from ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 in short sequences of three to five shots, with two cheap low-resolution takes before each approved version was made at full quality. Cinematographer Andrew Fletcher graded it.
Two things sit beside the craft. Brooksbank now works at Absurd, the AI startup whose platform she used, and its chief executive is the film's executive producer, so this is also a showcase for her employer. No cost has been disclosed, and while the write-up calls it an unofficial spec, the end card shows real AXE products with no spec label on screen. Nothing published says whether Unilever or the agency knew about the remake.
Our take: the method transfers to any director with a folder of dead pitches, and the price tag is the one number still missing.
The clip is Cassandra Brooksbank's, from her own Vimeo upload. If it's yours and you want it removed, message us and it comes down.
Sources: No Film School, LBB, Vimeo, Oct 19 and 20, 2026.
Read the full article: thegenerated.com/stories/axe-spec-ai-cassandra-brooksbank-absurd-20261021
