Cassandra Brooksbank revived her dead AXE pitch with AI, and it doubles as a demo for her new employer

A young man in an enormous orange puffer jacket stands at the top of a snowy subway entrance in New York, then squeezes into a packed car next to a nun, a germaphobe in a surgical mask, a mother with a baby and a woman holding a small white dog. Over the next 60 seconds the jacket swells with his sweat, presses into the baby's face, bursts at the seams and floods the train. The last shot before the packshot is the nun, soaked.

The film is called For Days That Run Hot, and director Cassandra Brooksbank first pitched it in 2021 as an AXE spot written at The Martin Agency. She says it was shelved for budget reasons. This month she made it anyway, with AI, and on Tuesday she published a long first-person breakdown of how on No Film School. The method is the most useful thing in it. The context matters too: Brooksbank now helps run the AI company whose platform she used, and the film works as a showcase for it.

Who made it, and for whom

In the No Film School piece, Brooksbank writes that she "started working as a creative director with co-founder Philip Ho and the team at Absurd", a Los Angeles startup from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch that sells a shared production workspace for AI film teams. Her LinkedIn profile, as it appears in search results, goes further: it lists her as Managing Director, Commercials at Absurd since May 2026, building a filmmaker-led production offering for brands and agencies. Ho, Absurd's chief executive, is the film's executive producer, and the still at the top of the No Film School article is credited to Absurd.

The story also ran a day earlier, on Monday, as a news post on the trade site LBB, credited to the production company FANCY and carrying a quote from Ho: "AI has become incredibly powerful at generating images, but making a film is an entirely different challenge." Two outlets in two days, one campaign. None of that makes the work less real, and Brooksbank has a long commercial reel behind her, with spots for Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Unilever's Rexona, Ford and Barclays listed on her own site and her LBB profile. It does mean this is a director showing what her company's tool can do, not an outsider stumbling on it.

Treatment first, then casting

What makes her account worth reading is that she ran the job like a live-action commercial. She started from her 2021 treatment and rebuilt it inside Absurd, then turned it into an interactive website. She says the storyboard, which used to take her most of a week in Photoshop, took less than a day.

Casting came next, and her notes are candid about which models failed. Faces from Luma's Uni went nowhere: "After 16 attempts, I ended up with a collection of strangely textured men who looked nothing like my guy." GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst gave her the lead, whom she calls Justin, and Uni 1.1 built his reference pack from the front, profile, three-quarter and full-body angles. She cast about 20 commuters with short bios and wardrobe, used Ideogram to put the jacket on her locked lead without regenerating his face, and made separate references for the jacket's stages: normal, swollen, leaking and about to blow. Nano Banana Pro handled one of the leaking versions.

For the set she generated a battered subway car, made 360-degree reference views and an overhead plan, and gave each of the 20 characters a fixed seat, because, in her words, AI "has a notoriously terrible sense of geography". She also learned that the models confuse hot with orange: "Apparently, its first instinct is to turn the entire train into a giant Cheeto."

Shooting in sequences

The footage came from ByteDance's Seedance 2.5. Brooksbank grouped her 48-shot list into multi-shot sequences of three to five shots, each around ten seconds long, and ran two 480p takes of each sequence before rendering the approved version at 1080p. Scene detection on the uploaded film finds 48 cuts in 60 seconds, which matches her shot list. She says generation took roughly two days and that she went back for only two or three shots in the edit.

Her prompts read like directing notes. Asking for a funnier performance produced cartoon mugging, so she gave the lead a motivation instead: "Justin is desperately trying to act normal because he doesn't want anyone noticing he's sweating through his jacket." She also set project rules the platform carried from shot to shot, including "nobody plays the joke" and a rule that every effect had to obey real-world physics.

Post was conventional. She cut it in Premiere, replaced gibberish subway signs by hand with roto work and handed the grade to cinematographer Andrew Fletcher, who worked in DaVinci Resolve and added film grain with Filmbox Pro. "I was actually surprised by how much flexibility the footage had," Fletcher says in the piece.

What it cost, and the logo on the end card

There is no cost figure anywhere in either write-up. Brooksbank says only that "Absurd's budget tracking helped me keep costs under control." For anyone pricing a similar job, Absurd's public price list charges $28.33 for a minute of 1080p Seedance 2.5 output on its Studio plan, billed monthly, and $5.03 a minute at 480p, before rejected takes and image work. She works at the company, so her bill and yours are not comparable.

The text calls the film "an independently produced, unofficial AXE spec commercial", and the credits list The Martin Agency's original creative team. On screen, the film is less clear. It closes on three real AXE products, the AXE logo, the line "DON'T SWEAT IT" and a Unilever logo, and we saw no spec label in the frames we checked. Nothing published says whether Unilever or the agency knew about the remake, and we are not implying they approved it.

The dead-pitch folder

Every working director has a folder of boards that died in a budget meeting. Brooksbank's closing line is the useful part for everyone else: "I've got a pretty substantial graveyard of ambitious ideas that never got made." Her own rules for digging one up hold whichever platform you use.

• Write the treatment and board it before you generate anything, so the models serve a plan.
• Lock your cast, wardrobe and set geography as reference sheets, with a seating plan for crowds.
• Give characters motivations, and describe real light sources and lenses rather than asking for something cinematic.
• Test cheaply at low resolution, then render only the approved takes at full resolution.
• Finish it like a film, with a proper edit, sign cleanup, a grade and grain.
• If the spec carries a real brand, put a visible spec label on the film itself, not only in the credits.

Our take: this is a well-made spec and a generous, specific how-to, and it is also a sales demo from the person who runs the vendor's ad division. Both things can be true. The method transfers to any director with a shelved idea, and the missing number is the cost.

Timeline

• Date: May 2021. What happened: The Martin Agency is reported as a new AXE agency alongside MullenLowe; Source: Adweek; The Stable
• Date: 2021. What happened: Brooksbank pitches to direct the agency's AXE subway script; her treatment is titled RUSH HOUR. The project is later shelved for budget reasons, by her account; Source: Brooksbank's treatment site; No Film School
• Date: Oct 2025. What happened: Absurd launches from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch; Source: Y Combinator
• Date: May 2026. What happened: Brooksbank joins Absurd, listed as Managing Director, Commercials; Source: LinkedIn (search result)
• Date: Mon 19 Oct 2026. What happened: LBB publishes the story as a FANCY news post with a quote from Absurd CEO Philip Ho; Source: LBB
• Date: Tue 20 Oct 2026. What happened: No Film School publishes Brooksbank's first-person breakdown; she posts the film on X; Source: No Film School; X

Sources and what is unconfirmed: Cassandra Brooksbank's No Film School article (20 Oct 2026, full text read); the film on Vimeo (watched, frames and cut count checked; we did not review the audio mix); LBB's news post and work page (19 Oct 2026); her interactive treatment site; her own site and LBB's 2024 directors profile; Absurd's website and pricing page (read 21 Oct 2026); Y Combinator's company page; Adweek and The Stable (May 2021). Her LinkedIn title was read from a search result, not the page itself. The 2021 pitch and the budget shelving rest on her account, there is no statement from Unilever or The Martin Agency, and the production cost is not disclosed.

Link-in hub for QA (plain URLs, the CMS body carries no hyperlinks):

• https://nofilmschool.com/axe-by-cassandra-brooksbank
• https://vimeo.com/1236016280
• https://lbbonline.com/work/184989
• https://axe.cassandrabrooksbank.com
• https://absurd.com/pricing