Every year, Mother's Day is filled with campaigns celebrating mothers. But in a sea of generic tributes, we wanted to use the occasion to address something real: in an increasingly fast-paced and hyperconnected world, are we putting the people who matter most on hold?
Building on RECORD's ongoing exploration of the role screens play in our lives, our goal was to create a pause amid the constant noise competing for our attention. We didn't want to make people feel guilty, we wanted them to see themselves in it. We set out to tell an everyday story, with no villains and no extraordinary circumstances, one in which people from different backgrounds could see something of their own relationships in it and, after watching the film, reconsider their priorities and perhaps take a simple action: call, reply, be present. We also wanted to explore a creative question about the moment we live in: could increasingly artificial technology help tell a deeply human story?
Our goal was to combine cultural relevance, identification, and creative experimentation to turn a traditional Mother's Day message into an invitation to reflect on what truly deserves our attention.
Our first challenge was to move beyond the cliché without losing universality. We could have brought together multiple stories of mothers and children, but that would have diluted the emotional depth of a narrative built around a single protagonist, so we decided to tell one story that could represent many.
That's why we began by exploring how to create a recognizable Brazilian character without falling into regional stereotypes or generic representation. To tell a story that could belong to anyone, we created a protagonist millions could see themselves in. AI was a deliberate creative choice that made this approach possible. Rather than using the technology simply to reproduce reality, we explored its ability to build a playful, universal world. The clay aesthetic gave us enough distance from reality for audiences to project their own experiences onto the story.
The film follows an ordinary night: the city, a crowded bus, work, bills, and an avalanche of notifications. The character's routine accelerates along with the soundtrack, until a message from his mother interrupts everything. The physical and sonic pause becomes the message itself. The entire film was produced using AI tools for image generation, video, soundtrack, and post-production. One of the biggest challenges was maintaining character consistency across scenes. To solve this, we created different poses and contexts for the characters and used that material to guide subsequent generations. In just two weeks, a two-person team handled pre-production, production, and post-production, arriving at the final version of the film.
The project was designed from the start to work on any screen: produced horizontally for television and adapted to a vertical format for social media. The film premiered nationally during RECORD and RECORD News programming.
The film aired nationally during RECORD and RECORD News programming, with television broadcasts. On TV, it reached 19,584,180 unique people. Across television and digital, the campaign generated 41,224,311 total impacts. But for a campaign designed to make people stop and reflect, reach was not the only measure of success. The campaign also generated positive digital conversation, with audiences identifying with the situation portrayed and recognizing aspects of their own family relationships in the story.
The project also demonstrated that AI could be used to create an emotionally resonant narrative without allowing the technology to become more important than the story itself. For us, that was the most meaningful success: a campaign created to question the role screens play in our lives used a new technology of screens and images to prompt reflection on what exists beyond them.
AI created the images. The story created the connection.