Google H‑100

The brief came to me from REFERENCE. Google wanted the backgrounds in their North Star billboard content to be generated with Veo, their own generative AI video model, so the environments behind the 3D work had to come out of Google's tool itself.

REFERENCE entrusted me with those backgrounds, and with the workflow around them. I generated the three environments, blue, green and red, then took each AI-generated plate from raw output to something that could hold up on a screen the size of the North Star. Once every plate met a billboard-ready standard, I handed them off to REFERENCE's team of 3D artists, who integrated the backgrounds into the final billboard content.

Generative video does not hand you a finished plate. Getting environments that were right for this billboard took countless iterations, and every one came down to the prompt: which details to name, which to leave out, and how to word it so Veo would hold one look across three different color worlds. A result could be close and still be unusable at the scale of Times Square, so the work was as much about knowing what to throw away as it was about generating.

That process was part of a larger lesson I have been learning during my time at REFERENCE: understanding how these models actually behave, and integrating generative AI into my workflow as a real tool, with my own judgement deciding what goes out. This project turned generative AI from something I was experimenting with into a skill.