Stian Smestad. Selected work.

Directing & generative AI work

Refined Visuals

Global Campaign Direction

Directed international campaigns for adidas, Mercedes-Benz, Google, Netflix and Philips.

Refined Visuals

'Odori' Hybrid Short Film

Directed a virtual production dance film later independently rebuilt using generative AI into a completed 4K animation.

Interactive Concepts

'adidas Outdoor' Global Campaign
Director and Co-Creative Director. Through concept development, production, and execution of international campaign.

Collaborative Spaces

'CTRL RIOT' GenAI World-Building

Independent experimental identity and 'label'. Creating synthetic musicians, music videos and AI-driven narrative films.

Collaborative Spaces

'Hayley' Short documentary
Vimeo Staff Pick (1.2M+ views). A 90-second portrait on fear filmed at 2,800m in the Dolomites.

'Clinuvel' Documentary Portrait

Portraying a man living with EPP, a rare skin condition that requires complete avoidance of daylight. Shot in NYC, it combined intimate interviews with studio-based character portraits of individuals with related skin conditions.

Systems & software development

Minimalism in UX

Long-Form AI Writing Tool.

Making a structured AI-assisted writing system to help writers enter flow and quietly compound a record of your creative journey. (MVP)


Actors rehearsal app.
Designed interactive AI-assisted theatre rehearsal application for youth theatre group. Also had to build a pdf to text converter and a audio/text forge to sync text to audio. Build with Replit, elevenlabs, Gemini.

Brand Storytelling

LLM tools.
Built agentic LLM pipelines for structured, memory aware to e.g. concept testing across product and business ideas, including custom GPTs configured via .md instruction files, node-based Agent Builder flows, and notebooks using uploaded context files.

Minimalism in UX


AI creative tools.
Developing generative workflows for visual continuity, world design, control nets and aesthetic development for moving image work. (Using ComfyUI, Nano, legacy Gen image & video models, customised agents and Notebook. Mostly in cloud, but Odori was rendered on a RTX 3070i laptop in ComfyUI.)

Minimalism in UX

Teaching & industry engagement

Lead Designer, Freelance

AI Lecturer and Workshop Lead
AI & Media for film profesionals, Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)

Brand Designer, VisionWorks

Speaker at film and AI conference.
AI from a Directing perspective at
Filmpool Nord, Sweden.

Junior Designer, Bright Studio

Education

Lead Designer, Freelance

MA Interaction Design
London College of Communication (UAL), UK

Brand Designer, VisionWorks

BA (Hons) Film Production
University for the Creative Arts (UCA), UK

Junior Designer, Bright Studio

Film Foundation Course
European Film College, Denmark

Junior Designer, Bright Studio

Diploma in Immersive Media Production (XR)
Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), Sweden