The idea
Kroll Facility Services, admin on the third floor. Managing director Lüttgenau stands at the flip chart and announces: “As of today, we are AI.” Nobody knows what that means. Neither does he.
A mockumentary in the spirit of “Stromberg,” the German “Office”: handheld camera, interviews in front of a wall of binders, a zoom just before the punchline. Six characters, three episodes, and a corporate film the boss eventually made himself.
The three episodes
German is harder
To be honest: in German, the results aren’t as good as in English. Some of it is at amateur-actor level. For where things stand, it’s okay.
The reason is the models. Kling, which carries THE AGENCY and ANCIENT MARKETING, sounded so bad in German that I dropped it after the first test clip. Gemini Omni speaks every line word for word, but the voices sound artificial, some moments uncanny. Veo has better timing, but it invents words, cuts where it shouldn’t and burns in subtitles nobody asked for. I threw out the entire Veo version of episode 2.
Almost half of all image and video credits went into that search. What remains are mixes: in episode 1, Lüttgenau speaks through Veo, Petra and Ulf through Gemini.
The corporate film
A drone shot in morning light, handshakes, a narrator with too much pathos. That is the kind of corporate film German mid-sized companies ordered from a regional agency around 2015. This time Mr. Lüttgenau made it himself. He says so in the film: “Took three minutes.” Pause. “Four, with music.”
The film plays it straight and glossy. The cracks come from exactly the mistakes that happen when nobody checks. The glove wiping the window has one finger too many. The team laughing around the conference table doesn’t work at Kroll. The infographic announces 98.7 percent customer satisfaction, and underneath, in small print: “Internal survey 2019, response rate 11%.” All of it is on purpose.
Gloss runs overexposed and saturated, reality in a cinema look with handheld camera. I composed the music, “Rising Together,” with Suno, and the edit sits on its beats.
The voice is mine
The narrator sounds like a corporate film: warm, measured, completely serious. It is my own voice. For twenty years I have voiced brands under ichbinsprecher.de, and that brand voice now exists as a clone. For Kroll I didn’t record a single sentence myself. The clone spoke each of the eight sentences twice, and the directing assistant pre-sorted the takes. One of them said “Krall” instead of “Kroll” and was dropped.
So there is a second case inside this film: a voice that speaks without its owner in the room. It belongs to me. Whether it says the right thing, someone still has to listen.
What I take away
Mr. Lüttgenau is right: the corporate film cost almost nothing, about €11. The whole series came to about €134. Making it wasn’t the expensive part. Searching for a machine that speaks good German was.
And every episode needed a human who looked. Looking stays expensive, and you can’t skip it.
What this means for an organization
Strategy. Mr Lüttgenau announces: “As of today, we are AI.” After that, an anniversary speech is read out unchecked, a market overview cites an institute that does not exist, and in the corporate film a glove has one finger too many. The series tells what happens when a company introduces tools and forgets the process. And it shows a disadvantage of place: in German, the models are weaker than in English.
Role. Choosing a model is procurement. 48 percent of the image and video credits went into the search for good German. Someone has to decide, by which standard, and check again regularly. The models change faster than any framework contract.
Process. Every line is checked against the script before a human signs it off. With your own voice, one more question comes in: who may use the clone, and for what?
What stays human. Looking. The series cost about €134, the corporate film about €11. It is only cheap as long as someone checks. At Kroll, nobody does.