How The Gardening.club made AI Christmas Magic for McDonald's NL latest campaign.

Christmas briefs have a reputation in our industry. We all adore the magic, but let’s be honest: the production reality is usually the stuff of nightmares. It’s expensive, chaotic, and squeezed into deadlines that leave even the bravest of us feeling… seasonal anxiety. So when McDonald’s Netherlands came to us with a comedic Christmas campaign made entirely with AI, it felt like a great challenge, could we pull off a craft first approach with AI?

"I wish more people understood: magic isn’t the technology. The magic is the team behind it."

From day one, we knew this couldn’t be an “AI experiment.” It had to feel like a film shaped by directors who obsess over lensing, blocking, and the micro-expressions that make comedy land. The fact that the medium happened to be AI was almost incidental. Craft was the point.

So, we brought in The Sweetshop’s live action comedy directing duo MAMA. Their understanding of rhythm, tone, and what actually makes something funny shaped every frame. Casting, wardrobe, mood, shot progression - none of that comes from an algorithm. That comes from directors who know how to steer a story.

We built The Gardening.club to protect our directors, to future-proof their careers, expand their toolkit, and keep storytelling firmly in human hands. After nearly 25 years pouring myself into craft, I’m not interested in letting AI bulldoze the instinctive, intuitive brilliance of real creatives.

This script was always designed for AI,  not as a gimmick, but because the scale simply couldn’t exist in live action without a monstrous budget and a freezing European winter shoot. Still, anyone who thinks AI makes things easier hasn’t tried making AI behave. One of our biggest battles? Teaching the models what a miserable Christmas actually looks like. Left to their own devices, they kept insisting on “holiday magic” , the perfect white Christmas with glossy catalogue cheer. McDonald’s wanted the opposite, slush, grit, and bleakness. Let’s just say it took a fair bit of psychological warfare to get the models to give us a properly dreadful December. And for the record: directing an AI cat is no easier than wrangling a real one (which will be hilariously featured in the second spot). In AI, “cat” equals chaos, which suited the spot perfectly. 

This wasn’t a “prompt and pray” project. TBWA Netherlands and McDonald's were razor-specific about the requirements of every scene, down to the tiniest detail, and to deliver that, we needed total control over the AI at every stage.

"This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film."

The pipeline behind this film was enormous, far closer to a VFX-heavy feature than a “quick AI job.” For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to ten of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening.club working in lockstep with the directors. Every shot travelled through a rigorously engineered toolchain: real Google Earth plates, advanced style-transfer, pixel-level photo repair, custom LoRAs, control nets, bespoke ComfyUI graphs, and thousands upon thousands of tightly steered iterations. Then came compositing, lighting balance, physics corrections, artefact removal, and final finishing in Flame. We generated what felt like dailies - thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production.

This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.

And here’s the thing I wish more people understood: magic isn’t the technology. The magic is the team behind it, people who pushed, questioned, experimented, swore at broken models, solved impossible problems, and refused to stop until every frame felt cinematic.

I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment. To me, it’s evidence of something much bigger: that when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. 

So no - AI didn’t make this film. We did.