Members of Google Creative Lab joined Brandcenter’s Forum speaker series and worked directly with students in a hands-on workshop.
In addition to speaking at Forum, Google Creative Lab leaders Tristan Smith, Creative Lead and Brandcenter alum (Copywriting, 2009), and Emily Moore, Executive Producer, worked with Brandcenter’s Associate Director of Technical Training Micah Berry on a hands-on workshop.. Students were selected to experiment with Google’s newest AI video, image, and sound tools to test capabilities, workflows, and creative applications.
Creative exploration in practice
Students were given an open-ended assignment and three weeks to develop a short film before sharing the work and feedback on the tools with the Google team during an in-person session.
“What surprised me, in the best way, was how fast students stopped chasing novelty and started chasing control,” said Berry. “They weren’t just prompting for cool clips. They were designing a process, building keyframes, testing variations, locking style, troubleshooting consistency, and making choices like directors. Story still comes first, and the tool has to earn its place in the pipeline.”
Across the board, the level of student work reflected both creative risk-taking and discipline. Projects sparked thoughtful discussion during the final critique, prompting broader conversations with the Google team about creative workflows, emerging best practices, and where these tools show the most promise in real-world use.
Berry also noted that collaboration emerged as a key theme. Students working in small groups quickly ran into small collaborative friction points, with lots of exporting, uploading, re-importing, and manual tracking of versions and assets, mirroring challenges the industry itself is actively working to solve.
“We’re already seeing collaboration show up more in the broader community conversation and inside the tools themselves,” Berry added. “That’s a meaningful signal that Google isn’t just building models. They’re listening to creatives and shaping products around how the work actually gets made.”
Student spotlight: The Mouse Before Christmas
One standout project from the workshop came from Eliza Fry (Art Direction, 2026), Chloe O’Hallaron (Art Direction, 2026), and Casey Hickman (Copywriting, 2026), who created a holiday-themed animated short.
“Using AI didn’t change how we approached concepting,” said Fry, “but really allowed us to bring our vision for Kip to life. We did normal brainstorming sessions without AI, and once we decided on our story, we switched to generating images of the mouse and the world he would live in.”
The team used Nano Banana for nearly all image generation, MidJourney for image generation of the two mice, and Veo 3 and Flow for video generation.
Fry tells us a bit more about the process and the tools, “Generating keyframe images first really helped us when we brought the story into Veo 3. I was amazed that the tools were able to give us a fairly consistent character and style of animation that we wanted to create.”
“It was interesting to hear the Google team say that stylized animation works especially well with AI right now,” said O’Hallaron. “Realism is still tricky to fully capture, so going this route was especially fruitful for us.”
AI as a creative collaborator
Beyond visuals, the team discovered an unexpected production benefit in sound design.
“When we realized the audio in a bunch of our clips was going to be unusable…we realized we could use Veo 3 as a foley machine,” said Hickman. “We generated all of our sound effects from scratch, perfectly matched to our shots. It saved a ton of time, and it’s something I’ll use on future projects.”
Hickman also credited Berry with introducing a structured prompting workflow that helped students unlock more advanced capabilities.
“Using ChatGPT to translate normal language into JSON prompts for Google’s video tools made a huge difference in our capabilities,” he said. “Massive thank you to Micah for teaching and providing us with the tools to succeed.”
The forum and workshop underscored Brandcenter’s commitment to engaging with emerging tools in a thoughtful, hands-on way that’s grounded in storytelling, process, and creative intent.