Luxury advertising has always been about more than products.
It’s about discipline. Time. Obsession. The subtle distance between effort and mastery.
Every Second Engineered is a cinematic spec commercial that explores those ideas through the lens of motorsport and horology, built from the ground up using a hybrid workflow that blends traditional film craft, VFX, and generative AI.
The result is a 60-second flagship film (with a 30-second cutdown) that balances raw performance with aspirational luxury, grounding the campaign in narrative, character development, and a hybrid production workflow.
Created by John Cherniack, the project imagines Valente Chrona GT, a fictional Swiss luxury watch tied to Formula 1 culture. It follows a single character on a familiar arc: from small-town grind to the global stage. What makes the project notable isn’t just the polish of the final film, but that it follows the same thesis stated in the concept: the film mirrors watch engineering with racing performance.
Creative Strategy: Building the World First
This project, like most great creative pursuits, began with a blank page.
No existing brand, product, or talent.
The goal was to create a fully realized luxury watch campaign from scratch, blending world-building with cinematic storytelling in a way that could sit credibly alongside agency-level work.
John developed Valente as a heritage Swiss watchmaker founded in Geneva in 1912, originally known for precision chronometers used in aviation and exploration. A century later, the maison is reimagined through motorsport culture, aligning with performance, speed, and endurance, and positioned as the official timekeeper for Cadillac’s Formula 1 team.
At the center of the campaign is the hero model: Valente Chrona GT, a flagship automatic chronograph designed specifically for the Cadillac F1 partnership. Its details are treated seriously, not symbolically:
- Sapphire crystal and caseback
- A 45mm brushed stainless-steel case
- Skeletonized dial and ceramic tachymeter bezel
- A limited-edition engraving reading “Cadillac F1 Edition.”
- Swiss automatic movement (28,800 vph, 60-hour power reserve)
The watch isn’t a prop, but rather an instrument.
The Human Face: Jack Raines
Every strong brand needs a human anchor.
For Valente, that anchor is Jack Raines, an American Formula 1 driver in his late 20s, raised on dirt tracks and karting circuits in the Midwest, now stepping into the global spotlight as the face of Cadillac’s F1 program.
Jack is written with intention. He’s disciplined, stoic, and obsessive about performance — someone who believes in “hours for seconds.” Visually, he carries the marks of that life: a healed scar on his cheek from a karting crash, faint mechanical and racing tattoos, a wardrobe that shifts with context, from dusty kart tracks and gritty boxing gyms to pit lanes, podiums, and red carpets.
He represents a balance of grit and refinement as an outsider-turned-pioneer.
The Film: Discipline → Struggle → Triumph
The campaign was designed around a 60-second flagship film, supported by a 30-second high-energy cutdown repurposed from the hero spot. The narrative follows a five-act structure:
- Discipline – Training rituals. Repetition. Breath, sweat, and preparation.
- Grind & Roots – Boxing sessions, trail runs, karting echoes, a Ducati kick-start — small-town struggle made tactile.
- Struggle – Race chaos, telemetry obsession, frustration, isolation in the garage late at night.
- Triumph – A daring overtake, pit wall tension, the checkered flag, podium celebration.
- The Road Ahead – Lifestyle and legacy: victory lane, red carpet, a Cadillac DeVille giving way to the futuristic Opulent Velocity concept.
Throughout the film, match cuts and callbacks tie moments together: sweat becomes rain on asphalt; sparks from a race car mirror sparks from a grinder; a karting flag echoes the F1 checkered flag. The watch appears organically on Jack’s wrist during training, in telemetry moments, on the wrist of a crew engineer, and finally in polished macro hero shots.
Vehicles serve as emblems. A Ducati represents raw mechanical grit. The DeVille carries heritage and understated luxury. The Cadillac F1 car embodies pressure and precision. Opulent Velocity gestures toward the future.
A Four-Step Production System
While the film is an artistic work, the process behind it was structured and deliberate. John organized the entire project into four clear stages:
- Concept
Starting from zero, defining the brand, product, and character, and shaping a cinematic vision that balances luxury and performance. - Story
Building backstories and narrative logic, then using generative tools to explore tone, mood, pacing, and storyboards that unify heritage, speed, and lifestyle. - Execution
Combining AI models with traditional CG and VFX. Training custom LoRAs for characters and products, generating imagery and motion tests, and layering in original music and voiceover to establish a cohesive film language. - Finishing
Polishing every frame to luxury standards — balancing color, lighting, and pacing in the edit, refining product hero shots with CG detail, and ensuring the final spot feels cinematic, timeless, and intentional.
Hybrid Workflow: Exploration, Control, Craft
The project relied on a hybrid AI/VFX workflow, where each tool was chosen for a specific role.
During exploration, custom GPTs guided concept development, copy, and pacing. Image platforms like Freepik provided varied visual outputs to explore story direction. Node-based tools such as Weavy powered early motion studies using models like Kling, Runway, Veo, and WAN, helping define rhythm and movement.
For control, John leaned heavily on ComfyUI, using multiple model variations to refine character design, handle inpainting, and integrate CG elements with precision. Local workflows allowed for iterative testing without sacrificing consistency.
Where AI reached its limits, traditional VFX craft took over. Video-to-video techniques, CG animation, and manual refinements ensured the final film carried the realism and clarity expected of luxury advertising.
Character Consistency with LoRAs
Maintaining Jack Raines’ likeness across stills and motion required dedicated LoRA training in both Flux and WAN. These models captured facial structure, proportions, and defining features, allowing Jack to appear consistently across scenes, lighting conditions, and camera angles.
Inside ComfyUI, WAN 2.2 Animate played a key role in transferring performance and motion onto Jack while preserving his identity. A Florence-based captioning workflow was used to generate clean, descriptive dataset captions, improving stability and reliability across generations.
The result was flexibility without drift and continuity without rigidity.
Why It Matters
Every Second Engineered is presented as a proof of concept: a hybrid workflow combining traditional film and VFX craft with cutting-edge generative AI.
The stated goal is to show how hybrid workflows can deliver agency-level creative while building worlds, brands, and campaigns at speed. As the executive summary frames it, the result balances raw performance with aspirational lifestyle, while the Chrona GT is positioned as an emblem of precision and triumph.
The watch goes beyond measuring time.
It symbolizes it.
Learning from Every Second Engineered
At Lighthouse AI Academy, we see Every Second Engineered not just as a polished spec commercial, but as a blueprint for modern creative production.
It shows what happens when:
- The concept isn’t rushed
- LoRAs are trained with the end result in mind
- Characters and products are designed with intention
- Image generation is treated as a production workflow, not a moodboard
- Video, color, sound, and editing still follow the discipline of traditional postproduction
From a messy idea, you can now build a full narrative system: storyboards, motion tests, performance transfer, and a finished cinematic spot. From a dataset, you can train a LoRA that carries a character’s identity or a brand’s aesthetic across an entire campaign.
Most importantly, this project shows how much becomes possible when motivated creators are given structure, clarity, and room to experiment.
Precision, Performance, and Process
Every Second Engineered shows what happens when storytelling, character, and product are built as one system.
AI isn’t the headline here. It’s the engine accelerating iteration, preserving consistency, and supporting cinematic craft from concept to final polish.
The takeaway is simple: when technology is guided by taste and intent, it doesn’t replace the work — it sharpens it.
That’s the mindset we teach at Lighthouse AI Academy: designing production-ready workflows that hold up to real creative and commercial standards.
And that’s what Every Second Engineered ultimately demonstrates:
USING AI TO ENHANCE, NOT REPLACE.
At our academy, we’re here to help you design workflows, not just prompts; systems, not just shots.
View our courses now and begin your journey to creating whatever your heart desires.
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