Leveraging AI technology to power Norby, the clever little language robot

Challenge

We were tasked by Dell to produce creative assets to showcase the story behind Norby, its creator and its potential to reshape how we learn new languages. The campaign also aimed to promote Dell’s AI-ready workstations by showing how Norby benefited from using these products – especially their capacity to train and fine-tune large language models and speed up the iteration process of development.   
 
Luxid took charge of the entire creative process, from narrative development to filming and producing the various assets. Despite a tight timeline and a few minor bumps along the way, we collaborated seamlessly to capture all the elements needed for a successful campaign.  

Solution

We kicked off the project with a pre-interview call with Norby’s CEO, Adrian Mullan, to help us develop a compelling storyline. During the call, we discovered that Adrian, who is of Irish and Chinese heritage, struggled to learn Mandarin as a child and thus reconnect with his Chinese roots. This experience gave him the idea to create Norby the Robot – a conversational language companion designed to help people learn a new language or practise speech therapy in a fun and engaging way. With this context in mind, we created a story lens that focused on the human endeavour behind the robot. We created an interview guide based on Adrian’s personal experiences and Dell’s request to showcase the AI capabilities of their products.  
 
On the day of the shoot, everyone was ready to roll… except Norby, the star of the campaign. Poor little Norby wasn’t feeling well that day, so we had to think on our feet and find another way to get Norby involved in the campaign. Our solution was to edit in Norby’s voice and facial expressions using existing materials in post-production – including the CAD file of Norby to add in 3D designs into the video. We also had limited footage of the robot from previous marketing material, so we made sure to capture Norby against the green screen to get all the footage we needed for the customer story video.  
 
After resolving this minor hiccup, we conducted an in-person interview with Adrian in front of a green screen and included Norby in the interview shoot. We worked with a film crew to film the interviews across two different ‘pods’ in one large room, plus a side area to shoot ‘lifestyle b-roll’. To make the interview more personal, we also encouraged Adrian to break away from his pre-prepared answers so that we could further explore his personal relationship with language and experience creating Norby.