Que Chiste - Swimwear Advertisement

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  Que Chiste - Swimwear Advertisement

Inspiration

I spend a lot of time in Baja. The land is wild, the people are resilient, and nothing behaves or happens in the way you expect. I designed swimwear to survive that environment—but the ads started telling their own story. What began as product promotion turned into a celebration, distortion, and documentation of Baja life. The suits stayed constant. The context mutated.

What it does

It’s a real ad for real swimwear. The video moves fast—driven by a post-punk Spanish track—and builds through escalating visual improvisations. At the end, it shifts into magazine-style portraits of the humans who wear the products. The product is a visual anchor, but the story belongs to the land.

How we built it

I used OpenArt AI and Runway AI to generate and composite scenes. The pacing was tuned to match the rhythm of the soundtrack—slightly accelerated, slightly chaotic. Structurally, the ad is modular: surreal sequences first, quiet portraits later. The swimwear was designed first, then tested against the visual logic of Baja.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was getting the prompts to behave. The content is slightly surreal, and AI tools don’t always respond predictably when the logic bends. It took time to coax the right visual tone without drifting into abstraction or losing fidelity.

Also, TikTok flagged the video as “dangerous content” and refused to play it and refused to allow me to promote the video—even though the imagery is clearly absurd and physically impossible. That tension between surrealism and platform moderation became part of the process.

There is also a Spanish version of this Ad, so there was quite a bit of translating and reformatting to do, especially with the magazine section at the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The ad doesn’t just sell swimwear—it sells the idea that the people of Baja are already living in a genre we haven’t named yet. The suits hold up. The stories land. And somehow, the chaos feels like home.

What we learned

Sometimes the ad is stronger than the product. Sometimes the product is just an excuse to tell a story. And sometimes, the best way to sell something is to let go of control and let the land speak.

What's next

I’m continuing with the Baja theme—not just for ads, but as a foundation for a larger body of work. The land, the people, and the surreal rhythm of life there have become a creative engine. The swimwear ads were just the entry point. Baja is the throughline.

Built With

• openart
• runway