Bring Your IF to Life

IF, Paramount+

If you could reimagine your childhood imaginary friend, what would they look like?

In the film, Bea helps imaginary friends reunite with the kids who created them. She keeps track of every IF at Memory Lane Foster Home by sketching them in her notebook.

For the campaign, we took that idea into the real world and invited fans to reconnect with imaginary friends of their own.

To kick things off, we posted a callout on X asking fans to describe their imaginary friends within a two-hour window. We also created a few examples inspired by Paramount titles like Evil, Anchorman, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, and TMNT to show people how it worked.

In those two hours, our team generated and edited more than 70 imaginary friends based on real fan submissions.

Some of AI-generated  IFs from fan's submitted descriptions.

Inspiration

SAAGOSKATT drawing competition by IKEA (image source).

An interactive experience at teamLab, Singapore.

One of my early ideas was to let fans submit either drawings or descriptions of their imaginary friends, then turn those ideas into something they could actually see.

Part of the inspiration came from IKEA's children's drawing competition, where winning doodles were turned into real plush toys.

Another came from a teamLAB exhibition I visited in Singapore. I colored a character on paper, scanned it, and suddenly saw my drawing moving across a huge digital screen. It immediately brought out my inner child.

I wanted to recreate a little bit of that feeling for IF fans.

Behind the Scenes

My hand-drawn sketch used as style reference.

Adobe Firefly image generation settings.

The challenge was figuring out how to create dozens of customized drawings quickly while still making them feel like they came from Bea's notebook.

That's where AI became useful.

After testing different tools, prompts, and styles, I developed a workflow in Adobe Firely that could consistently get us close to the hand-drawn look from the film.

I used one of my own pink, fluffly doodles as the style reference and developed a prompt structure that we could apply to each fan submission. From there, every generated image was reviewed and edited before it went live.

This gave us a way to respond quickly while keeping all 70+ drawing visually connected to the world of the film.

And just like that, we brought their IFs to life.

Legacy

Adobe blog feature.

Clio event — A view from my seat.

This project was later featured by Adobe as an example of using Firefly in entertainment marketing and was presented during an Adobe MAX session in 2024.

It also became a meaningful project for me personally. My creative director, Kelsey De Weerd, brought me into the campaign early, from attending a film screener for ideation to later recognizing my work during her talk at a 2024 Clio Entertainment event.

It was one of those projects that reminded me why I enjoy this kind of work: starting with a strange little idea, figuring out how to make it possible, and seeing real people interact with something I helped create.

Project featured on:

-> Adobe Blog (2024): Behind the scenes — How Paramount+ used Adobe Firefly generative AI in a social media campaign for the movie IF
-> Adobe Max Session (2024): New Creative Flows: The GenAI Jump-Start
-> Clio Entertainment (2024): Cocktails & Conversation

Project: IF — Bring Your IF to Life
Client: Paramount+
Date: May 2024
Creative Directors: Kelsey De Weerd & Monchaya Ngaolertloy