Billy Boman

From menswear to Midjourney

Billy Boman studied fine arts and design at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, then spent years designing menswear for H&M and AllSaints^[4]. His studio's own biography adds Tiger of Sweden, and a second career as a product and UX designer in tech, for Vodafone, PayPal and start-ups^[1][4].

In 2022, when Midjourney first opened to the public, he started making AI images, and soon AI video^[4]. The fashion eye never left: his channel is full of AI fashion films, for H&M, Chanel, Balenciaga, Acne Studios and AllSaints^{[3][38][40][46]}.

Spec ads that got him noticed

Through 2023 he made spec commercials for brands that had not asked for them, among them Levi's, Adidas and Volvo, and SHIFT reports that they drew the attention of MediaMonks and Secret Level^[4]. The best known is Adidas "Beyond The Blue", posted on 10 January 2024: 31 seconds of a runner on a cold blue shoreline, built from Midjourney stills, moved in Runway and pushed to 4K at 60 frames a second in Topaz^[14]. It has 72.9 thousand views, the most on his channel, with Ray-Ban "The Original" second on 26 thousand^[3][15].

Secret Level put him on the team for Intel's Vision 2024 film, AI Everywhere, made for the launch of its Gaudi 3 chip^[17]. For Ballantine's in Poland he was the AI artist on five live-action ads, directed by Priit Palumaa: actors performed in front of LED screens showing AI-generated Polish locations, lit to match each background^[16]. His studio's site credits Monks on that campaign^[1].

AI is a tool with specific capabilities, not a universal solution.

Billy Boman^[4]

Darker films

Alongside the ads he made short films in a much darker key. Death as the: Motivator came out in September 2024, and Fear Of The Dark in January 2025: seven minutes on fear, dreams and darkness drawing on Joseph Campbell and Jung, lit in the chiaroscuro of German Expressionism^[41][18]. Fear Of The Dark won a Community Award at Project Odyssey Season 2^[10].

BOMAN Studios, and the classroom

He set up his studio in Stockholm as Billy Boman AI Productions, now BOMAN Studios, with Monika Kaczanowska as co-founder and Head of Studio^[1][3]. He teaches too: an AI for Designers course and a three-week creative AI module in the Content Engineering programme at Berghs School of Communication, with guest lecturers such as Sebastian Kamph^[4]. He gave the keynote "Designing for the AI Era" at the Stockholm Xperience Conference in 2023, made the opening film for the Stockholm AI Conference in 2025 with Google Veo 2, and spoke at Berghs' New Frontier evening in November 2025^[20][19][13].

In October 2024 he talked Midjourney with Rory Flynn and Drew Brucker on Fast Hours, in an episode titled Midjourney: The Ultimate Creative Multiplier^[11]. A year later Luma featured him in its own creator series, Exploring AI Artistry with Billy Boman, and he made a reel for Luma to show at MIPCOM in Cannes^[50][30]. On the last day of 2025 Rourke Sefton-Minns interviewed him on YouTube about going from freelancer to AI agency, a conversation watched 10.4 thousand times^[49].

Billy's AI: his own name on every idea

In 2026 he turned the spec ad on himself. Billy's AI Originals are short, absurd pieces in which the product is Billy: characters complain that Billy's AI gave them opinions, an airline captain called Billy announces AI turbulence, and animals tell him to go to hell straight down the camera^[22][21]. AI Hits Different, one of the first two, is his fourth most watched YouTube video, with 12.3 thousand views^[23][3].

Billy's AI Animals, in June 2026, was an ad for his own studio: ten animal sketches and ten terrible puns, from a manatee called Hugh Manity to a moose in a mosh pit, generated in Dreamina, upscaled with Topaz and graded in DaVinci Resolve^[21][34]. It opened AI LIVE on 30 June 2026 and took 12 straight 1s from the audience^[34].

You can do spec ads for the people that you want to work with or, as Billy does, he just uses his name throughout his ideas basically.

Chris Branch, AI LIVE^[34]

Directing for brands

In spring 2026 he set out his rules for AI advertising to Adweek, and told The Drum that working with AI is not about spending less, but about imagination^[5][6].

On 14 May 2026 Made by Humans added him to its directing roster as one of eight new AI directors^[7]. Four weeks later Lenovo launched its FIFA World Cup 2026 campaign, directed by Billy with the production company Ritual Labs, across CTV, digital and social in eight markets, with every sequence generated by AI^[8][9]. In September his channel posted a launch video for Luma AI's agent platform, The Brief, and a German CTV spot for the JAECOO 7^[28][29].

His studio's own site also lists BOMAN Studios as AI post-production partner, with ARC Creative, on Alaska Airlines' live-action and AI hybrid Super Bowl spot in February 2026, "Welcome To The Suite Life"^[1]. That credit comes from his site alone.

AI acting

By mid 2026 his question was whether AI can act. Billy's Long Shots, posted on 10 August 2026, is a run of short scenes made in Seedance 2.5 that are about performance rather than spectacle: a French bulldog laying down boundaries with his owner, a Breaking Bad parody, two brothers deciding about their father's life support, a diner monologue, soldiers, cotton pickers, a devil in the Midwest and a couple on a cold beach^[25]. On AI LIVE it took straight 1s, and while it played Billy told the hosts a producer and a screenwriter had approached him about turning The Good Boy into a live-action hybrid^[35].

Doukyonin, or The Roommate, followed on 31 August: a Tokyo cat explaining, with total confidence, what it is like to live with its owner, made entirely in Seedance 2.5 and premiered at a Dreamina event in Tokyo^[26].

It is not replacing taste. It is not replacing direction. It is not replacing judgement.

Billy Boman, on Doukyonin^[26]

How he works

He starts from the idea, not the budget^[24]. Start frames come from his own blend of image generators, where it used to be Midjourney for everything, with Leonardo and Magnific for creative upscaling^[24][16][17]. Motion in 2026 comes from Seedance 2.0 and 2.5 and Kling 3.0 on Dreamina; before that Runway, Luma Dream Machine, Minimax, Sora and Veo 2^{[25][24][18][47]}. Music comes from Suno and Udio, effects and voices from ElevenLabs, and he has had Seedance extend a 15-second beat of his own into new genres^[18][19][33]. Everything is upscaled, now Seedance's 720p to Full HD, once everything to 4K in Topaz, then edited and graded in DaVinci Resolve^[25][14].

With clients he is candid about what AI can and cannot do, and proposes hybrid shoots, retouching and inpainting where they fit^[4]. The Specsavers spec "20,000 Feet", made in 24 hours on one laptop, is the method in miniature^[24].

On AI LIVE

His work has been reviewed on the weekly show five times since February 2026, from a Seedance 2.0 spec ad recommended by a viewer to the Long Shots acting tests^[31][35]. Chris Branch is in a group chat with him and has said on air that he wants him on for a full episode^[32][33].