Jonas Hegi is a filmmaker and the co-founder and creative director of Builders Club, a studio known for creating visual worlds that mix design, 3D motion, AI and film production. Sitting in Morocco’s Agafay Desert at the close of the Paradigms conference, Jonas gestures to the rocky horizon. “I love film and photography and seeing light and thinking can we do something new. Nature is surprising me every day. I could stare at this landscape for hours – and the same is true for CGI, and also for AI these days.”
Fresh off his keynote on AI and the future of creative work, Jonas is eager to discuss how tools shape imagination. “Our studio is all about creating visual worlds and playing with imagination,” he says. “To do this we’re using tools to bring our imagination to life.”
That shift has already transformed Builders Club’s workflow. On a recent Nike project, Jonas says the scope was “so massive” it simply wouldn’t have been possible without AI tools. Using AI was a practical decision in this case, but it also gifted Jonas’s creative freedom.
“We suddenly realized we had a freedom to think incredibly freely in terms of what shots we wanted to do, what worlds we wanted to create. Things that aren’t possible with live action, without incredible budgets or timelines. It allowed us to actually be creatively incredibly free.”
Could a brand be fully automated?
Builders Club is owned by the design collective Forever; it sits alongside agencies FutureDelux and Tendril Studio. Within the group there is a thinktank-style AI group which takes the most creative minds from each studio to research and experiment in what is the future of creative and tech.
Jonas shares some of the conversations the group has been having. “What we see is that a lot of things are very much going towards systems,” he says. For brand leaders, the question becomes how to create systems that can scale autonomously or adapt, for example, campaigns that respond to cultural events or even rain, shifting tonality in real time.
Taking this thinking further, once AI can do this, it could brief itself, produce itself and buy the media by itself. “Then could a brand be completely autonomous?” the group is asking. Jonas sees a future where all these things are possible, but he believes a brand run and managed by AI would miss crucial elements of brand building: meaning, context and soul.
“AI is really good at imitating, really good at creating things, even creating original work, where it really has a problem creating meaning out of it, or purpose,” Jonas says. “It is this engine that is incredibly powerful, but it needs humans within the system to give it purpose, to give it a soul, to give it meaning.” This is where Jonas thinks we are heading towards in terms of building creative intelligence systems. That he says is the “next step”.
During Paradigms there was a lot of conversation about AI as a democratizer of production. Jonas believes that as more and more people have access to quality production then this forces people to be more creative, to step up their game.
“If you have a sea of images and if every brand can do the same thing. To stand out you need a good idea and this idea needs to have meaning and it needs to have a soul in that sense it needs to have a purpose, it needs to say something that is meaningful to an audience,” he says. This is the exciting part. Brands are forced to be smarter; they can’t just rely on “flashy images” because everyone will be able to create the same “flashy images”.
The rapid acceleration of AI means Jonas is wary of making claims of what will happen in the future and where the industry is headed. He instead likes to postulate on the possibilities of AI and what his studio is working towards.
Rethinking what a tool even is
Jonas prefers to refer to AI and emerging technologies as tools. “We have weird things in our minds, worlds and dreams. Humans have always had an urge to share these and language was the first means, eventually we started creating some paintings on stone walls and these days we have cameras, we have film, we have CGI, we have game engines and now we have AI.”
AI can express our thoughts, our dreams and can do “fantastical things”, but people mistake it for a “magical” thing that will solve everything, Jonas says. It should be treated like CGI or a camera in that it’s seen as a tool and you still need to know why you are using it and to think about how you are using it.
“It’s a bit like you have an incredible hammer, but if you don’t know what you want to do with it, then it doesn’t really have any purpose,” he says. “What really matters is the idea, the creativity – the technology is not a concept in itself.”
At Builders Club its creatives are always trying to explore the tools themselves, never taking them at face value. “What if you use it in a different way? Or what if you do something people don’t usually do? What is the visual you get out of that if you push it to a limit,” Jonas says.
Looking out at the sprawling desert view in front of us, Jonas suggests, yes you could prompt it to recreate this landscape so you don’t have to travel, making an image faster on less budget. But if you are thinking of using AI simply for this purpose, then Jonas says, that would be a bit of a shame. What if instead you tell it to do things where you don’t know what it’s going to do or what it’s going to look like and what’s going to happen.
“AI is capable of imitating perfectly fine but it’s also capable of doing something entirely original. I’ve seen things where I’ve gone ‘oh my god I would have never thought of creating that weird image’. That’s where things become really fun, and experimental and something new emerges out of it.”
So what does it take to flip AI tools on their head? As Jonas lays it out: “Curiosity and not being afraid to fail”. If you take out your camera to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon you are going to get a picture just like everyone else, but what if you dial up all the settings to the maximum and see what happens?
Jonas urges his fellow creatives to look for inspiration outside of their lane. “Look at nature or go into a city or go to an art gallery and look at paintings from the 15th century and see what they did,” he says. “This is so important because otherwise every brand starts to look the same, every campaign imitates because people want to be safe.”
Brands rarely want to do something completely new; they want to see that an idea has been proven to work somewhere else. But Jonas instead believes creatives should actively be pushing against that.
In the end, the real breakthrough isn’t the tech – it’s what you do with it. As AI reshapes the creative landscape, Jonas’s message is clear: don’t settle for safe or shiny. The future belongs to those bold enough to experiment, fail, and find meaning where algorithms can’t.
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