Love Letter (Hettas)

VFX and compositing for a Hettas campaign film, integrating AI-generated particle plates into live action, and building out the rest by hand.

2026
Hettas is a running shoe brand built specifically around women's biomechanics — performance footwear designed from a female perspective rather than scaled down from a men's last. The film follows that thinking: it's about women athletes, their bodies and their effort.
My work was the VFX layer — the smoke, dust and particles moving around the athletes, holding the sense of physical force the piece runs on.
Process & Techniques
The particle plates were generated by AI visual artist Calvin Herbst. Before anything moved, we agreed on how the two halves would meet: Calvin would deliver his plates on black, ready to be composited over Kelly's footage on my end.
We ran the first pass on stills rather than motion. Generation costs credits, and testing a direction on a still frame is far cheaper than discovering the direction was wrong after burning through a sequence. Once the look was settled, it went to motion.
From there it was compositing in After Effects: grading the plates so they sat inside the footage rather than on top of it, plus the blurs, masks and hand-rotoscoping the movement demanded. I reinforced the AI base with dust and particle footage, and built additional detail directly with Particular where the shot needed something specific.​​​​​​​
The film was handed on for grading after my pass, and finished in two versions: a director's cut, and a client cut delivered at 30 and 60 seconds. What's shown here is the director's cut.
Credits
“Love Letter” for Hettas
RUNNERS: April Cargill, Cindy Quiroz, Moni Hendrix
DIRECTOR Kelly McKay
PRODUCER Nicole Palermo
BRAND: Hettas
CEO: Lindsay Housman
MARKETING ADVISOR: Julie Channing
DP: Kyle Rose & Ashton Green
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Cassidy Campbell
GAFFER: Ashton Green
1ST AC: Pim Rouyer
2ND AC: Esteban Campagne
STILLS: Kristina Sikora
EDITOR: Alison Grasso
POST SOUND SERVICES PROVIDED BY: Harbor
SOUND MIXER, Catherine Sangiovanni
SENIOR AUDIO PRODUCER, Cameron McGarry
AI ARTIST: Calvin Herbst
VFX ARTIST: Alberto Martín Paz
LOCATIONS: Alexander Payson
CASTING: Tammy Salazar-Andurand, Women Make Moves
SPECIAL THANKS: Joan Creative, Alexander Payson, Jiggy

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