A widely recognized television performer stands beside a basketball court and delivers a funny, impassioned campaign pitch in fluent Japanese. Viewers will never know that she never set foot on that court. Or that she doesn’t speak a word of Japanese.

Our media team worked with the performer to capture her parts in a studio and in English, then used generative AI — along with a unique post-production workflow in partnership with a new vendor — to apply the facial expressions, physical gestures, and vocal tonalities that make her look and sound like a fluent Japanese performer.

Without AI, this project would have been exponentially more expensive — or outright impossible. And even more amazing applications are in the pipeline.

At StudioNorth, we see artificial intelligence not as a replacement for expertise, but as a powerful tool to amplify it. Here’s a look at how we’re leveraging AI to expand our media team’s productivity and creative range — and give our clients more wow in less time.

Additional video production AI applications — so far.

AI is already transforming our post-production processes with integrated tools that enhance color, audio, and transitions.

Another example is the natural-sounding speech synthesis software from ElevenLabs, which not only speeds audio clean-up but enables dubbing into any number of languages. We leveraged this software to make a podcast series available to a much wider global audience than our client would have been able to afford otherwise.

Without these AI tools, many of our client’s media productions would be far less impactful — and a few might never have gotten the green light at all.

Generative AI doesn’t have to be the Wild West.

At various conferences we’ve attended, speakers have described a “Wild West” atmosphere around genAI where the rules and guidelines can’t keep up with the technology’s evolving capabilities.

We get it — but we don’t buy into it.

When it comes to AI, we prioritize trust, consent, and compliance, ensuring our applications meet legal and ethical standards along with our clients’ expectations. We’re vigilant about:

• Segregating each client’s data from all others’
• Making sure no client data nor work in progress can be used to train public AI applications
• Verifying that all material our applications use or generate is legally available
• Being fully transparent with clients about how and where we’re using AI on their projects

We’re also careful to dedicate sufficient time to training. Many AI tools require a fair amount of learning to be used efficiently, so we invest our own resources to make sure our AI processes mesh seamlessly with the workflows and timelines our clients expect.

AI applications we’re exploring (2025 edition)

In addition to the solutions mentioned above, here are some tools we’re testing. Maybe one of them will enhance your next project with us!

• Runway generates videos, images, and other multimedia content, plus useful editing tools such as special effects and generative fill to support post-production.
• Live Link AI searches longer-form videos to identify shorter clips ideal for social media, based on human faces and other points of focus along with spoken content.
• Udio creates custom music based on specific descriptions, styles, instruments, and more. It also offers tools to remix and adjust the song length.
• Stemz lets you split a music file into multiple tracks based on vocals and instruments, so you can remix different tracks and variations from one song.

We encounter exciting new tools all the time, so this list is bound to evolve over the next few months. Stay tuned!

AI and SN expand what’s possible in media production.

From Fortune 500 clients such as CDW and Lenovo to leading-edge healthcare and IT clients, we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish with genAI in media production.