A down on his luck actor wakes up one morning to discover his image has been stolen by a Gen AI Jesus, and now everyone thinks he's the second coming. We are in a post-truth world where nothing is as it seems, and we want to crack open conversations about AI…by cracking people up!
(The above campaign image was made with GenAI with express permission from the actor it depicts.)
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Check out Mr Jesus on Seed&Spark!
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“Mr Jesus is about our profoundly human questions about faith and purpose, and what happens when technology gets involved. Artists have always been writing notes from the near future, imagining what could happen if the technology at hand gets out of control and how that impacts everyday people.” The goal of this project is to start necessary conversations about the role of technology in our lives: how we use it, who is making it, what their goals are, and what any of us can do about it.
An important part of the team’s strategy is to host conversations about technology in faith spaces, because they’re such an abundant way to reach people in their communities.
This campaign is about AI and the role it plays in our lives. It’s also a SAG-AFTRA production and more than anything was dedicated to following the hard-fought guidelines and rules laid out by the unions to protect the actors and all the creators contributing their work to the project.
The film they’re making does not use Generative AI for video content, and neither did the pitch video. However, the team wanted to use the ways in which AI can be comically bad and cheesy as a comedic element on their campaign page and in their video. So they used still images generated by AI to create humorous images of the actors and participants.
They only used images of performers with written permission as outlined by SAG-AFTRA. They had some performers decline to be used for these images and they simply used other imagery as needed.
The team also hosted an online event called “How Artists Can Lead the Conversation on AI” as a part of their campaign, inviting experts to answer hard questions. This was a way for the team to demonstrate that they were dedicated to their impact goal of starting conversations about AI in their communities.
The team was made up of six core team members splitting the responsibilities of the campaign. The plan was to generate a lot of video content to set a launchpad for the conversations they plan to host as a part of their impact campaign.
The team worked backwards from the launch date of the Film Impact Georgia Rally and began outreach and social media posts 6 weeks before the campaign launched.
They hosted two events during the campaign - the virtual event on Artists and AI mentioned above and an in-person event. The second was a live event called “Humans Rool, AI Drools,” a comedy improv show hosted in a church basement. The team reached out to a local church and shared their campaign. The church offered their basement (which had a stage and was already used by a local theater company) and also offered to let the team come and and promote their event in front of the congregation on the Sunday before the event. The team set up computers at the entry and asked for a contribution or follow of the campaign as entry to the event. They raised over $3,000 from an audience over 60% of which were not already in the team’s network. They took photos and video and were able to share out fresh content on social media and in their campaign updates from the event during the last five days of their campaign.
The team raised the full $34,000 goal, part of which came in a loan of a comprehensive camera package from ARRI Rentals. They completed principle photography in September 2025 and plan to submit to film festivals for 2026 and also release through an impact campaign starting in January 2026.