The creative company ManvsMachine—an almost prescient name in the age of AI disruption—began two decades ago as a studio dreamed up by Mike Alderson and Tim Swift over pints in a London pub. “I remember Tim was obsessed with us not sounding like a bunch of students,” says Alderson, a former pro downhill mountain bike racer. “So I was going with all sorts of names that sounded cool. But Tim is a business-driven creative. He wanted something that said what we did. ManvsMachine also sounded assertive and powerful, and we also wanted a name that was a bit provocative.”

The studio’s founding ethos crystallizes a long-standing tension in design—the push and pull between craft and tool. For many creatives, idea precedes execution; in visual-effects shops, technique often leads over concept. “And we were like, ‘No, both are equally important,’” Alderson says. “Always has been. Always will be.”

And so, as AI roils the global tech sector and headlines tally tens of thousands of layoffs over the past twelve months, ManvsMachine remains unruffled. The studio has flourished by treating the tension between humans and machines as a creative engine rather than an existential threat. “It’s more like man and machine in the way we operate,” Alderson explains. “That’s what we do every day: people and technology, ideas and tools. We acknowledge both. AI, within the confines of the creative industry, is just another tool—a power up in the man-versus-machine, or man-and-machine, ethos of making cool stuff.”

In 2016, ManvsMachine took that philosophy across the pond with the opening of a Los Angeles office, where Alderson is based today. The studio’s work moves fluidly among disciplines—design, film and visual art—and across wildly varied products, from Magnum ice cream to the reMarkable Paper Pro Move tablet, Moncler outerwear, Cash App’s digital wallet and the Mustang GTD, Ford’s highest horsepower street-legal Mustang ever. The throughline is consistency: every brief is treated with the same insistence on strong ideas and meticulous execution.

The studio’s executive creative director, London-based Mike Sharpe, joined ManvsMachine in 2020 after running his own studio. “We have this saying, ‘Design by doing’—that’s how we like to work,” he explains. That ethos feeds into a counter-current to digital overreliance: a renewed emphasis on hands-on craft, including stop motion, hand-drawn and cel animation. “The press is constantly positioning AI as a negative force threatening creativity,” says Sharpe, “but hopefully, it’s actually giving new life to some of the traditional craft that was dwindling.”

Still, he admits AI is changing how briefs come in. “It’s getting harder and harder to find a brief for us to play in because they’re arriving so fully formed thanks to AI storyboards,” he says. “They’re not just written scripts anymore. They’re not just hand-drawn sketches and storyboards. They’re full-on color storyboards with casting, lighting, styling—it’s all there in the images, and it’s hard to unsee it.”

Sharpe says he sometimes has to step away and “stare at a blank wall,” just to reset.

ManvsMachine has been part of WPP since 2015, when the founders sold a majority stake to brand specialist shop Landor. But it continues to collaborate with independent creative shops: Wieden+Kennedy, for example, enlisted the studio to create campaign visuals for Ford’s Mustang GTD, contributing direction, design and animation. To avoid being hemmed in by pre-baked AI briefs, however, the shop typically prefers a direct-to-client relationship—about 70 percent of its work comes straight from clients. “A lot of the time, agencies have already spent three, six or even nine months getting to a brief before it reaches production partners,” says Sharpe. “At that point, it’s harder to challenge the thinking or step back and say, ‘Have you looked at this another way?’”

US fintech company Robinhood hired ManvsMachine in 2024 to conceptualize, design and direct a brand relaunch for its all-in-one trading app, unifying crypto, stocks and ETFs into a single visual and motion language with the commercial Future Trading. The spot was named a 2025 One Show finalist and won silver at the Brand Impact Awards.

“Every time we work with ManvsMachine, the studio feels like an extension of our team—building on the foundation of our brand and making it better. The creative team is in it with you from the start: pressure-testing the strategy, sharpening the brief and pushing the thinking before a single pixel is placed,” says Carl Luetto, head of creative for Robinhood. “We’ve brought them rough thought-starters and watched them develop into fully realized concepts that exceeded every expectation. The team brings genuine strategic rigor paired with extraordinary creative taste.

“In a world increasingly flooded with AI slop, they are true curators and tastemakers,” he adds. “And when it comes to execution, they deliver at a level that stops you in your tracks—flawless craft, jaw-dropping attention to detail, every single time.

“One of the few partners I’d trust in any room, with any audience, without hesitation,” Luetto concludes.

Although ManvsMachine treats AI as another tool, the studio is working to establish guardrails and best practices. Andrew Hopper, who joined in March to help define ManvsMachine’s approach, had already been exploring such ideas publicly. In a LinkedIn post, he described building a custom storyboarding tool that ingests a screenplay, characters, locations and visual style, then breaks the script into scenes, generates prompts, groups shots and produces stacked frames—while still allowing manual tweaks, guide sketches and exports. “Bit by bit, it became a tool that supports how I think, not a tool that thinks for me,” he writes—a philosophy that aligns with ManvsMachine’s. “I’m not trying to make AI content. I’m trying to stay in the craft. To build a workflow where the creative decisions still belong to me. What I choose. What I reject. How the idea grows.”

The studio initially advertised for a head of AI, but Hopper and the team settled on a less prescriptive title instead: head of creative systems. “One of the reasons he was right for the job is that he found the term ‘AI’ too defining. The role is broader than that—it’s about creative systems, and we’re still figuring out how those tools fit into our work and our moral compass,” Sharpe says, noting that the industry has always evolved through changing systems and tools.

These shifts include moving from CPU-bound to GPU-accelerated rendering, the rise of procedural tools like Houdini to generate complex effects through rules and algorithms, and the adoption of modern editing systems and real-time workflows that have transformed how motion design is created and refined. What makes AI different, Sharpe suggests, is the moral dimension it introduces into that long evolution of tools and systems.

“Using AI inside the computer feels like a natural extension of tools we’ve relied on for years,” Sharpe says. “We’ve long made CGI ice cream, drinks and trainers, so AI simply slots into that workflow. But substituting AI for lens-based work—actually going out and shooting on location—starts to feel wrong.”

With roughly 60 staff split between London and Los Angeles, ManvsMachine is at its largest-ever headcount. That growth has come in part from giving each studio the autonomy to develop its own strengths.

“I massively underestimated the differences between the United States and the United Kingdom,” Alderson admits. “There’s a difference in almost every microinteraction. It all adds up—everything feels different, especially on the West Coast. When we opened [the branch in] Los Angeles, we quickly realized you can’t force an East London design studio there. You make the key hires, let it form its own culture and strengths, and figure out its superpowers—and that’s how it played out.”

As a result of the Los Angeles office, for instance, ManvsMachine has started to lean into more broadcast work.

“We had been the design guys, but we’ve drifted into TV because directors like Sharpe have brought deep live-action experience,” Alderson says. “That part of our business, which is closer to the traditional advertising work of agencies, has grown a lot over time.” It has been a welcome challenge: “We’re a design studio more than a production company, so sometimes we have to give agencies confidence that we can direct,” he continues. “I just did a pitch deck for a TV commercial, and it’s interesting how the words you choose to express the same thing are very different as a director than a designer.

“I love it,” concludes Alderson. “It’s psychological, it’s tactical and it’s a lot of fun.”

On the festival and conference circuit these days, he often hears people “nervous and obsessed with predicting the future,” he says, as if that alone might help them navigate it. He tells them that while the industry is in constant flux, ManvsMachine’s core operating principles have been the same since it started.

“I honestly think there’s never been a more important time not to chase the future and just focus on being one thing,” says Alderson. “We’ve always maintained a 90 percent full-time staff model, which is a bit old school. But it means we know exactly what our capabilities are, rather than winning a job and scrambling to figure out how to do it afterward. That stability—knowing exactly who you are, what you can control and understanding change will find you—is more important now than ever.”

That philosophy has kept the studio in the game for almost two decades. “What I am most proud of is our consistency,” he adds. “From day one, we set out to be in the top 5 percent of the industry—and we’ve stayed there. We haven’t had to reinvent ourselves with every new technology. The model works, and it’s exciting that it keeps delivering. I think we can do this for another 10 to 20 years.” ca