Inside THG’s content creation space where AI meets human artistry

You never know who you might bump into at THG Studios. The vast, labyrinthine site – situated on THG’s sprawling 16.8-acre HQ near Manchester Airport – has hosted the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, who flew in for a Louis Vuitton photoshoot.

David Beckham has also been spotted. Gary Neville and Ian Wright regularly visit the studios to record their football podcast, The Overlap. Molly-Mae Hague, Terry Crews, Sebastian Vettel and Ricky Gervais are no strangers, either.

If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably seen content created at the 160,000 sq ft creative space, encompassing 27 different content areas and two dedicated food studios with professional kitchens. It is home to expansive stages for big-budget epic ads, tabletop set-ups for quick-fire social commerce, and everything in between.

Brand users include Holland & Barrett – which has its stage set up like a home kitchen to film social content – Asda, Toblerone and Myprotein. All have filmed recent campaigns at THG Studios, which sits within the company’s recently demerged e-commerce platform business THG Ingenuity.

In the newly launched virtual production studio, cameras are focused on a dinner table set-up. Behind it, a 10m x 4m LED screen displays a trendy apartment setting. The apartment doesn’t actually exist – it’s generated by Unreal Engine, a computer game graphics tool developed by Fortnite maker Epic Games. The CGI space is hyper-realistic, but can be quickly adjusted. The room could be made more ‘American-looking’, perhaps, or the setting shifted from evening to morning.

“Everyone’s heard the term ‘fix it [in] post’,” says senior videographer Anthony Turner. “I hate it… because I’m a control freak! Instead, before the shoot we dial in the look in the Unreal world, decide where we’re going to shoot from, where the content will sit. If you see it and say: ‘You know what? I don’t like the colour of that wall, I want it to be blue’, we can change that.”

The technique – pioneered on Disney’s Star Wars franchise series The Mandalorian – also means brands can shoot tailored product ads for distribution across different markets in one go. They can simply adjust the background without having to find new locations or build new sets for each.

AI ‘hybrids’

Down another hall is the iLab, launched late last year. Here, generative AI is used to blend new and existing product photography with AI-generated backgrounds, as well as to create original images, video content and mock-ups of visual advertising.

“We built iLab because we believe in something bigger,” explains Paul Harrison, creative innovation manager at THG Studios. “Through an extensive period of research and testing, we’ve discovered the real magic happens when we combine human creativity with AI. This hybrid approach greatly enhances the ideation process. While AI cannot replace creative minds, it acts as a catalyst for creative talent. A prompt creates a spark; skill and experience lights it up.”

Along the corridor, cedar-smoked salmon is being cooked on an open fire in the middle of a forest. Or so it would appear in the digital images captured by the photographer for the client brand’s social posts.

The food is real – cooked in one of the studios’ professional kitchens – and so is the grill. But the fire is clever lighting and a mini-smoke machine, and the idyllic woodland background is AI-generated onto a digital screen behind.

Achieving the shot ‘for real’ would require a location, the permits to shoot there, transport – and a couple of hours of just the right sunlight. Here, everything is “so much more controllable”, a food photographer explains. Plus, the shot can be taken as many times as needed to get everything just so.

“We’re at the forefront of blending technology and creativity,” says Cat Mellor, director of creative services at THG Studios. “Our goal is to redefine how brands approach content creation by combining the best of our team’s experience, creativity and talent with AI to deliver high-impact, innovative visuals that resonate with customers in real time.”