A Pivotal Moment in My CGI Journey

October 21, 2025 | 11:06AM

For the first time in the 9 months since I started learning this skill of CGI, specifically for product advertising, I have never felt this much clarity and peace.

I’ve spent the past few days agonizing over a minor existential crisis over my own relevance, as a new 3D Artist, in a world where AI has already been rapidly developing to the point where you have all these mind blowing software that could create really high-quality outputs with a simple prompt.

However, today, having spent the past 3 hours of my morning diving deep into my fears and worries in order to sift through the noise, I have found peace and clarity that I have never experienced before in this journey. 

I want to use CGI (and potentially mixed media) as a way to get people to actually care about the luxury and premium brands that they're wearing/using. 

I want to use CGI as a medium to get people to "feel" a certain way for each unique and different brand. 

Doesn’t matter if the product ad/commercial is just 5-10 seconds or if it’s all the way to 2 minutes. I want to use emotions & feelings as the foundation of the works that I create to get people to at least feel something, and ideally care about a particular brand.

It’s funny because now that I’m reading what it is that I’m typing right now, it seems so obvious and simple. It’s to the point where I’m even giggling a bit as I’m reading this while typing  because I’m a bit confused as to how and why I never realized this earlier. But the thing is, stepping into the world of CGI, I took on a very technical approach. It was hard to feel “creative” at the very beginning when you’re trying to figure out what keys to even press on your keyboard to get the software to do what you want. So, I’m giving myself a bit of grace right now on the fact that I’m only now realizing this haha.

The only reason why I’m documenting this very moment right now, out of all the other memorable moments since I started learning this skill the past 9 months, is because this very moment is such a significant turning for me, my place in this even-faster-improving moment in history now with the insane rate of improvements in the AI industry, and also how I want to position myself moving forward and what I specifically want to do.

Some time into my journey of learning this skill, I had the wild thought of creating one of the biggest and best CGI studios in the Philippines and also creating product ads and commercials that I personally would love to see on the big screen ( think NYC Times Square) and to work with an amazing team along the way. I stopped caring about creating the “biggest” and “best” CGI studio based in the Philippines at some point, since my initial reasoning behind it was shallow, and I simply thought it would be a “fun” thing to be the biggest and best. But the idea of creating product ads and commercials that I feel are worthy of being on the big screen still stuck with me. But that very phrase felt vague. I didn’t have a clear direction nor the slightest idea of how to execute that, and so a few months after having thought of the idea of wanting to create “billboard & big-screen” worthy product ads & commercials, I’ve essentially been going on a very curved path; not sure exactly how to execute it, but not completely lost that I had no idea what I wanted to do. The only thing that I could rely on then was what Alex Hormozi very often says is that with any skill acquisition, you need: volume & time. So, that’s what I focused on.

Fast forward to today, I spent the past few hours of my morning trying to navigate all this by doing some introspection work & also analyzing the 17 CGI studios I had saved and bookmarked in my Chrome tab and the CGI commercials that I had saved from Instagram. I  analyzed why is it that I somehow feel drawn in and constantly am looking for inspiration from only a very few studios (~1-2) out of the others that I’ve saved. And after a few hours, trying to break down all this, I finally got my answer. I know what type of work excites me. I know what things gets me interested, and most importantly, I know what I want to do. 

I want people to care. I want people to feel. Then simply using CGI as my medium of executing on my creative desires. 

As for the reason why I decided to specifically work with premium and luxury brands, I simply saw a big opportunity in that space and saw that there was a lot of value to be added, and so I took the leap and here I am now; building the foundation and the skills needed in order to provide as much value as humanly possible in my domain of interest:))

I don't believe CGI on its own is going to stand out forever. I firmly believe, right now, that there's a certain time and place for purely CGI driven commercials, but people are only going to be drawn to something that they care about genuinely, either the brand, the people behind the brand, or the story behind the brand. And that involves people. Exceptionally amazing people.

So, I eventually plan on heavily branching out to mixed media creation, in time, in combination with AI into my workflow, while building an amazing team. But for now, I’ll take things one step at a time. 

A few days and weeks prior to this, I was a bit afraid about AI, since seeing a lot of the massive and rapid improvements in AI recently made me realize how at risk the field of CGI product advertising is for many (but really any industry is; it just feels more "real" for me because I'm experiencing it first hand working in the CGI industry). 

But right now, I feel more open since I finally have a clearer direction of where want to go: “I want to make people "feel" a certain way that gets them to actually care about these luxury brands", thus I no longer feel threatened by AI since I'm pursuing what I feel is a combination of artistic pursuit driven by a personal desire to craft something, with CGI as one of my medium (eventually to branch out someday).

It only makes sense, at least to me, to assume that if AI is trained on countless data from millions to billions of humans on Earth, and if we define "creativity" as simply the collective experience of an individual that molds a person’s very unique perspectives/tastes/etc., it only makes sense that, at some point, AI would be able to replicate and have that same level and depth of creativity and taste that humans often call, "the soul" of a creative work.

With that, this marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter of my journey. Super stoked and looking forward to creating some really great stuff that consumers get to care about, and that luxury brands would love. And I also look forward to the amazing team that I one day would be able to work together with, and the value we could create.