Story · ESPN

Hoops culture, rendered by AI.

Now in its third year, ESPN’s basketball campaign was rebuilt with a custom generative-AI diffusion pipeline as the core creative, design and animation engine.

ESPN
Client
Creative, AI & Media
Discipline
2025
Year
Australia
Region
The brief

Make Gen-AI the core pipeline.

In our third year of the campaign, we set the ambitious goal of using generative AI as the main creative, design and animation pipeline, creating a unique visual style that would captivate basketball fans and excite them about ESPN’s basketball offering.

The approach

Human expertise, machine scale.

The campaign relied on the seamless fusion of artificial intelligence and human expertise. Led by Ryan Bodger, alongside our in-house team of creatives, strategists and technologists, we worked hand-in-hand with our own custom Gen-AI diffusion pipeline, guiding its input data and outputs to align with ESPN’s brand identity and quality bar.

The human touch was essential in refining the AI-generated content, injecting emotional depth and crafting visual narratives that struck a chord with basketball fans.

Your Home For Hoops is a clear example of the COLLIDE-AI generative pipeline in action, built on client-owned input data, Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI.

The outcome

A new paradigm of possibilities.

A synergy of human ingenuity and artificial intelligence, the campaign delivered a distinctive, rights-owned visual world for ESPN basketball, proving a generative pipeline can carry a flagship brand campaign end to end across creative, design, motion and media.

Selected stills

From the work.

The AI stack used on this.

The tools, selected for the brief and orchestrated through our COLLIDE-AI pipeline.

Stable Diffusion
Image
ComfyUI
Pipeline
COLLIDE-AI Diffusion
Custom core
RAG + LLMs
Research

Credits.

Keir Maher
EP & CSO
Ryan Bodger
CCO
Bob Connelly
CD, Motion+VFX+AI
Shayne Carter
Producer
Oscar Norin
Media
Josh Groom
Edit
Ethan Cohen
Motion+VFX+AI
James Martell
Sound
Jemma Hawksford
Client Lead, ESPN
All projects Disney+

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