IF
AR Campaign | Immersive Web
Project Summary
Cutting-edge AR and AI brought the imaginary friends of IF to life, giving audiences a way to meet, create, and become their own IFs across social, web, and retail, all in celebration of a child's imagination.
Create shareable celebrations of imagination and creativity while introducing the characters of *IF*.
- Drive awareness for the theatrical release of the new feature film
- Bring the film's imaginary friends to life
- Invite audiences to express their own imagination across multiple platforms and executions
The Challenge
IF follows a young girl and her neighbor who share the unique ability to see everyone's imaginary friends, even the ones no longer needed. The film blends live-action and animation, with an array of celebrity-voiced IFs ranging from a banana and a glass of ice water to a flower and a friendly big blue monster. These characters needed to land as more than playful companions: they had to read as a source of strength and possibility, right out of the gate.
Introducing an entire menagerie of brand-new characters to audiences was an early priority, and the first challenge PBM had to solve: how do you make dozens of unfamiliar imaginary friends feel instantly lovable, shareable, and worth spending time with?
THE SOLUTION
Pretty Big Monster answered with a multi-platform campaign spanning social AR, a custom AI pipeline, and web-based experiences, each one designed to turn passive character introductions into active creative participation. Rather than simply showing audiences the IFs, every execution invited fans to dance with them, draw them, color them, or take a selfie alongside them.
The campaign also extended into retail through partnerships with Baskin-Robbins and Crayola, bringing the film's themes of imagination into everyday spaces families already visit.
Vibe With Blue
The initial promotional push put two of the film's main IFs, Blue and Blossom, directly into fans' hands. Using skeletal tracking, PBM rigged 3D models of the characters to mimic users' movements in real time, so anyone could open the lens and dance alongside Blue and Blossom.
Key influencers were enlisted to kick off the trend, showing their followers the creative potential of the lenses. The resulting participation challenges spread across social platforms as fans everywhere shared their own dances and scenes with the characters.
Draw Your Own IF
The Imagination Station tackled a milestone AI challenge for the team: take a user's drawing and show how it would look in the world of IF. Built around a sketchbook-style interface pulled straight from the film, the site invited participants of all ages to draw their own imaginary friend.
From there, PBM's custom AI pipeline took over. Through a magical process hosted by the film's own characters, each drawing was digitally transformed into a being that looked at home in the world of the film: a personalized moment tied directly to the characters audiences were just meeting.
The Pipeline
The AI pipeline was trained on a roster of Paramount's IF characters and could also transport a user's creation into a New York City neighborhood matching the film's setting. It recognized hand-drawn elements and re-rendered them in a style consistent with the film's aesthetic, so every creation felt like it belonged in the world of IF.
Notably, the entire pipeline was architected to run fully on the client's own AWS cloud infrastructure, eliminating reliance on third-party AI hosting and giving the client total control of scaling and costs as usage demand fluctuated.
Emotional Engagement
By providing a means for fans to create something personal and see it come to life, the Imagination Station deepened emotional engagement with the film and made the themes of creativity and imagination not just something to be passively observed, but something to actively participate and engage with.
Campaign promotion on social media and shares from users themselves drove participants to the site.
Treat Your Imagination
PBM also partnered with Baskin-Robbins to support the brand's "Buy One, IF One" marketing campaign, a cross-promotion designed to drive ice cream lovers into stores while spotlighting the film. The team built two Snapchat AR lenses, deployed on social media and promoted in-store, featuring Blue and other key IFs alongside two limited-edition flavors created for the partnership: Blue's Boardwalk Bash and Blossom's Berry Twirl.
In Baskin-Robbins locations, customers accessed the lenses by scanning QR codes on in-store marketing collateral, turning a routine ice cream run into a branded, entertaining AR moment.
In Baskin-Robbins stores, customers could access these lenses by scanning QR codes on marketing collateral in and around the store, providing the customers entertainment during and after their visit with an engaging, brand-aligned activity.
Photo Booth With Blue SOCIAL AR
In this photobooth style experience, users take a series of selfies with an animated 3D Blue, programmed to make unique facial expressions with each snapshot.
To further highlight the Baskin Robbins partnership, Blue held a custom-modeled 3D ice cream cone of his signature flavor, along with another cup of ice cream for the user.
The end of the experience resolves in a photostrip takeaway of the snapshots—just like a classic real-world photo booth experience—for users to share out with their friends and contacts on Snapchat.
Using original production models as a guide, our optimized real-time models were given expressive facial blendshapes to help them "mug" for the camera.
Blue and Friends Social AR
This Baskin-Robbins branded lens again featured the 3D animated Blue on the selfie side, but in world-view, the rest of the cast magically appeared in users' real-world surroundings through colorful, explosive transitions, letting fans place their IFs anywhere they pointed their camera.
Magic Coloring AR Website
Blending a classic kids' activity with cutting-edge tech, this execution combined traditional coloring with augmented reality to give kids and parents something to enjoy together. Blue and Blossom were featured alongside messaging for Crayola, another key film partner.
Special coloring sheets were distributed across movie theaters, events at Crayola Experience in Orlando, and as downloadable content online. After coloring, users watched their sheets come to life in AR on any phone or tablet. No app install required: the web AR experience ran directly in a standard browser.
Fans could capture photos or videos of their creations and share them instantly to any social platform, extending the moment well beyond the coloring table.
After coloring their sheets, users watched as their drawings magically came to life in AR, on any mobile phone or tablet. (No app install required—web AR allows users to simply visit the site on their standard browser.)
Fans were also able to take photos or videos of their creations that could be immediately shared to any social platform, providing a memorable takeaway that extended the engagement beyond the activity.
No IFs About It
The campaign successfully leveraged emerging technologies to bring the film's themes of friendship and imagination to life. By using AR and AI, the promotional activities didn't just introduce the film's characters in a novel fashion. They also elicited deep engagement by letting audiences interact creatively with characters they were meeting for the first time.
Between the lenses and effects, the Imagination Station, and the Magic Coloring activity, the campaign garnered millions of organic user-generated impressions. Hundreds of thousands of users drew their own IFs, and countless hours were spent coloring IFs and watching them come to life in the weeks leading up to the film's release.