AXE's shelved 2021 subway spot returns as a 48-shot AI film

A commercial that died in a budget meeting in 2021 came back this week as a finished 60-second film, generated instead of shot. Director Cassandra Brooksbank posted the spot, For Days That Run Hot, as an "unofficial AXE spec commercial," and on October 20 published a long first-person account of how she made it on No Film School. Trade outlets LBB and shots ran it first.

The film is a miniature disaster movie on a New York subway. A young man in an oversized orange puffer jacket boards a packed car, the jacket swells with his sweat, presses into the mother beside him, and bursts, flooding the train. It runs a minute, and The Generated counted 48 cuts in it, the same figure as the 48-shot list Brooksbank says she worked from.

What is For Days That Run Hot?

Absurd is a Los Angeles AI filmmaking platform from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, built as a shared production canvas for AI film teams. Brooksbank says she imported her 48-shot list into it and grouped the shots into sequences of three to five, each around ten seconds. The footage came from ByteDance's Seedance 2.5. She ran two 480p takes of each sequence, reviewed them, then rendered the approved versions at 1080p, and says the generation took roughly two days.

Four image models did the pre-production. GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst cast the lead; Luma's Uni 1.1 built his multi-angle reference pack; Ideogram moved the wardrobe onto a locked face; Nano Banana Pro made one leaking version of the jacket. She cast about 20 commuters with short bios and a fixed seat each, and built 360-degree reference views of the car. Cinematographer Andrew Fletcher graded the cut in DaVinci Resolve and added 250D grain and halation in Filmbox Pro.

The method is the part that transfers. Write the treatment first, lock the cast, wardrobe and set geography as reference sheets, test cheap at low resolution, then render only the takes that survive the edit. "AI doesn't need to generate your ideas to be incredibly valuable," she writes.

No cost figure appears in her account or in the trade coverage. She says only that Absurd's budget tracking helped her keep costs under control. Absurd's public price list charges $28.33 for a minute of 1080p Seedance 2.5 output on its Studio plan and $5.03 a minute at 480p, before rejected takes and image work. She works at the company, so her bill and a customer's are not the same.

That context is the catch. Brooksbank writes that she "started working as a creative director with co-founder Philip Ho and the team at Absurd," and her LinkedIn listing, as it appears in search results, titles her Managing Director, Commercials since May 2026. Ho, Absurd's chief executive, is the film's executive producer. The film works as a demo for the studio she helps run.

It is also unsanctioned. The credits call it "an independently produced, unofficial AXE spec commercial" based on an original concept developed at The Martin Agency, and the end card carries the AXE logo and a Unilever logo. AXE and Unilever have not said publicly whether they knew about the remake, and no production cost has been published.

The film is at vimeo.com/1236016280, and the full interactive treatment for the original pitch is at axe.cassandrabrooksbank.com.