"Virtual Environments" (Letterfest)

Project Title: "Virtual Environments": AI-Enhanced Product Photography for Letterfest Client: Letterfest (Personalised Plant Pot Range)

The Brief: To overhaul the visual assets for Letterfest’s personalised plant pot range without the logistical cost of a physical location shoot. The starting assets were basic product photography; the objective was to transform these into a suite of premium, high-fidelity images that could serve both clean e-commerce needs and aspirational lifestyle advertising.

The Approach: I utilised generative AI to act as a "virtual studio," taking the base product images and building entirely new worlds around them. The strategy involved creating two distinct visual identities:

Warm Lifestyle: Placing the pots in sun-drenched, organic settings (stone garden steps, cozy windowsills) to evoke the emotion of gifting.

Clean Studio: Generating consistent, beige-backdrop studio environments to highlight the product details and typography for the "shop window."

Key Challenges & Solutions:

Environmental Generation: The challenge was ensuring the lighting and textures of the AI-generated backgrounds matched the perspective of the original products perfectly. I generated specific surfaces, weathered stone for the outdoor shots and soft-focus interiors for the "New Home" pots to ground the products in reality.

Virtual Botanical Styling: The original assets lacked the lush, varied foliage required for a campaign. I used AI to "plant" specific botanical elements, from vibrant hydrangeas for Grandad to structured cacti for modern homes and fresh herbs for Dad, tailoring the visual styling to the specific target demographic of each pot.

Outcome: A comprehensive library of photorealistic studio and lifestyle imagery created entirely digitally. This workflow turned basic input photos into a polished, versatile ad campaign (used across Meta with promotional overlays), proving that AI can replace expensive set builds while delivering high-end aesthetic results.