In search of The Spark

Today’s scientists are driving the most remarkable leaps in human progress. Yet all too often, their stories are told from sterile lab environments, failing to capture the courage and curiosity that could inspire the next wave of discovery. SCIEX came to us with the same ambition as always: if our instruments are making capable what was impossible even one year ago, what can we do in marketing that would have been unthinkable even one year earlier? That question became our creative brief and our north star.

A campaign built around real scientists, for an audience of real scientists, sounds like a natural fit. But this is a community that sees through polish, skips past product messaging, and has sat through enough conference keynotes to know when a brand is performing rather than connecting.

The brief demanded something genuinely participatory. Not a film to be watched and forgotten, not another set of assets to scroll past. Something that made every person in that room feel like the story belonged to them. That was the creative challenge going in. The question was how to build something with that ambition, inside the real constraints of time, budget and a conference hall at ASMS 2026.

These weren’t case studies that needed dressing up. They were real journeys, to the deepest rainforest, the coldest arctic tundra, the manic pace of clinical trials, already more compelling than anything scripted. We didn’t need to amplify them. We needed to follow them, and build a campaign that invited an entire industry to find their own.

“In Search of the Spark” was born. A campaign built not around what SCIEX’s instruments could do, but around who was doing extraordinary things with them. An idea that at it’s heart would take the form of a cinematic POV film, a world premiere at ASMS, and a live reveal that would make every scientist in the room the star of their own story.

The campaign launched in the weeks before ASMS, the biggest global mass spec conference on earth. Filmic teasers of our three scientists rolled out alongside movie posters and a campaign trailer, each carrying the same visual motif: a rush of light, a spark, cutting across every asset – all asking: where will your spark take you?

All of it pointed toward the hero asset. A POV-style film, six months in the making, placing the audience in the shoes, snow boots, motorbike leathers and lab coats of scientists just like them. The POV format kept each protagonist intentionally anonymous. Not an act of modesty, but one of immersion.

with personalised film trailers and movie posters landing in their inboxes live, in the room, built in real time.

A live event became a personal, shareable keepsake. In the hours and weeks that followed, personalised spark movies spread organically across the conference and across social. The campaign had done what it set out to do. It gave scientists their spark back.

The six-month creation process started the old-fashioned way, with hand-drawn scamp storyboards for every shot before any AI work began. From there, each shot required a precisely crafted style frame specifying the exact camera lens, perspective, angle, lighting and environment, paired with GoPro body-cam footage and passed to the AI as a visual target. We settled on Luma Labs as our primary platform, with Seedance 2.0 brought in for shots requiring a higher degree of scene transformation. Text prompting alone was never sufficient. Accurate results required style frames, reference images, compositional scamps and precisely worded technical descriptions of materials and surfaces, every time.

Some scenes required approaches we had to invent from scratch. The arctic sequence, originally filmed in our editor’s back garden, couldn’t produce the right depth and parallax for an open landscape, so we camera tracked every shot, rebuilt the scene as a full 3D landscape in Cinema 4D and rotoscoped limbs back in to give the AI a correctly proportioned environment to work with. Client equipment brought its own constraints: branded instruments couldn’t legally appear anywhere in the AI pipeline, so we built the lab environment without them, introduced an unbranded 3D CAD model, prompted realistic materials onto it, and reintroduced client branding only in the final compositing pass.

Where background detail was too fine for the AI to render accurately, those areas were cropped, upscaled, regenerated at high resolution and composited back in. We developed a hybrid workflow combining AI-generated edits with Photoshop layer masking so that only modified areas were replaced, preserving everything else in the frame. Every finished shot was manually reviewed and art directed before it reached the edit. 135 shots across five environments, cut into a single film, built the way the campaign was conceived: through human creativity, pushed further by AI than would have been possible even a year before.