Fast Fires Are Preventable
The problem
Most homes lost to wildfire are lost to embers and small ignitions, not a wall of flame — which means most are savable, but the fixes are unglamorous, and nobody wants to watch a slideshow about gutters.
The approach
Pitch five fully-realized tonal directions at once instead of one — photo-real, comic, retro, heroic, buddy-comedy — so the client could choose a tone by looking at it, not imagining it from a paragraph.
What was built
Generative image tooling (Ideogram, Gemini, ChatGPT, Magnific upscaling) driven through large-format Photoshop compositing, turning each concept around inside days rather than weeks.
The outcome
Three PSA decks turned around in about six weeks, each through multiple revision passes — iteration cheap enough to actually do.
Ralph Bloemers had a message that’s genuinely hard to sell: most homes lost to wildfire are lost to embers and small ignitions, not a wall of flame — which means most of them are savable, and the fixes are unglamorous. Screen your vents. Pull the wood fence off the wall. Clear the first five feet. Clean the gutters. Nobody wants to watch a slideshow about gutters.
This campaign is one strategy for that problem: make it funny and put a movie star in it. Five celebrity-fronted PSA concepts, each a different tonal bet on the same brief, produced across January and February 2025 using generative-AI image tooling driven through Photoshop compositing at large-format scale. The checklist behind every concept is identical — disconnect the fence, screen the vents, clear the first five feet — only the delivery changes.
A note on likenesses. Several concepts use celebrity likenesses — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kevin Hart — as unlicensed pitch stand-ins to sell the casting idea to the client. They’re shown here as what they are: concept art, not finished, licensed media.
01 — Disconnect Your Fence
The pitch: a wooden fence attached to your house is a fuse. Disconnect it, and you break the path fire uses to reach the structure. Played as photo-real hero plates dropped into burning backdrops, hand-lettered speech balloons, and a pulp action-poster title treatment — the bet was that a prevention message lands harder when it’s funny than when it’s frightening. Delivered as a six-page deck across three revision passes.
02 — Be the MVP
Same spokesperson, opposite register: heavy crosshatched pen-and-ink instead of photo-real comedy, built on a football conceit. MVP = Most Valuable Protector. The homeowner is the player; home hardening is the playbook.
03 — Rocky Mountain High (in a Firestorm)
The most irreverent of the three PSA concepts: the gag is the delivery mechanism for the checklist, each panel a home-hardening instruction shouted as a punchline — “Remove Combustibles!” “Screen the House!” “Clean Gutters!” Produced as a multi-panel comic strip inside a large-format layered Photoshop file, plus a four-page deck.
04 — Be Your Own Hero
The campaign line that came out of the three PSA concepts, developed into finished key art: “Be Your Own Hero — Prepare Your Home for Fast Fires.” The homeowner, not the firefighter, is the hero of the image — a caped figure standing over a small house against a flame silhouette.
The key art series pairs the heavy-inked spokesperson against fully rendered wildfire-prepared neighborhoods — metal roofs, gravel and non-combustible ground cover in the first five feet, a “WILDFIRE PREPARED HOME” yard sign — and carries a companion campaign badge, “Fast Fires Are Preventable — Home Hardening Works,” across every concept in the series.
05 — Kevin Hart & The Rock: Defensible Space
A buddy-comedy vignette: one performer caught mid-scramble, trapped between two overgrown hedges pressed against a mid-century modern house, while the other advances with a hedge trimmer — clearing the vegetation that shouldn’t be there in the first place. The joke does the teaching: overgrown planting hard against the wall is the hazard. Explored across several framings and crops to test composition before pitch.
What the AI generation actually bought
The honest answer is volume and range at pitch speed. Ralph’s real constraint was that he didn’t know which framing would land, and finding out the traditional way — commissioning even one polished version of each of four separate specialist disciplines (photo-real comping, hand-inked storyboarding, retro badge illustration, sports-comic illustration) before knowing whether the tone works — costs more than a message like this is usually funded for. Generative tooling collapsed that: five fully-realized tonal directions instead of one, three PSA decks turned around in about six weeks with cheap-enough-to-actually-do revision passes, and the ability to cast a recognizable face as a pitch stand-in to sell the idea before the format was greenlit.
What this archive doesn’t contain: any record of what happened after the pitch — whether a concept was greenlit, aired, funded, or measured for reach. That number, if it exists, sits with Ralph.
Same brief, five tonal bets — the checklist never changes, only the delivery does.