Leeds Digital Festival 2026, live at Tungsten Studios
The Hybrid Production Approach: In Action
In Action
Great creative, built live from one real brief.
Thursday 1 October 2026, 1.30 to 3.30pm. Tungsten Studios, Unit 8, Armley Nano Park, Leeds LS12 2BJ.
Drop your question →Not got a ticket? Grab one
The questions you're too scared to ask.
There's always one you'd never put your hand up for. Drop your burning question here, anonymously if you'd rather, and the sharpest ones get answered live on the day. Can't make it in person? Ask anyway. No name, no company, no catch.
And while you're here, not got a ticket yet? It's free, around forty seats.
Grab your ticket →We've talked and theorised about AI long enough. This is the part where you actually have to do it, and it is where most teams are quietly falling behind. The talking-about-it era is over. The Hybrid Production Approach is BACK for year two at Leeds Digital Festival, and this time the panel gives way to the work itself. We take one real creative brief, a hero product with real ambition behind it, and build it live in the room.
Everyone agrees that creative and brand building are back at the top of the agenda. Almost nobody is showing you how it actually gets made now. And making it has never been harder. You're making more than ever to feed the always-on machine, trying to make work that breaks through and holds onto real emotion when most advertising has quietly let it drain out, all on a budget that hasn't moved. And now you're expected to have AI worked out on top. No pressure, then.
Which leaves the real question. How are you meant to commission great work, or crack a genuinely hard brief, if you don't understand how it gets built? That's the gap, and it's exactly where we come in. Brand-side or agency-side, you're the one carrying the creative, and understanding how it all gets built shouldn't be your job. It's ours. Everyone's having to reshape how they work around this. So are we.
More ambition than one shoot can hold. We keep the hero real and build the rest, live.
Last year we made the case, and the room kept saying the same thing back to us, we didn't know you could do that. This year we skip the argument and go straight to the work. In the studio, in front of the LED volume, we take one real creative brief, a hero product with more ambition than a single shoot could hold, and make it whole live. We shoot the hero for real, in camera, then use AI augmentation to build the world around it and push it a step further, using whatever the job needs, virtual production, CGI, AI, a traditional crew, and the judgment of which earns its place where. Everyone else can keep arguing about how AI fits into content. We are already making it work on real jobs, and this is the rare chance to watch it done up close, on the actual work.
How we already work
BPP
Five worlds built in two days a traditional shoot could never have reached.
View the case study→
Kasai Grills
Summer made in the middle of December, when a real shoot was impossible.
View the case study→Real work from real briefs, small budgets through to big, with the honest problems left in rather than the bits a showreel quietly cuts.
This is your chance to ask us straight. How does any of it actually get made? And when parts of a job get handed to automation, how do we keep it to the standard you'd expect from a full traditional shoot? You'll get an honest answer. A person makes the call on where automation earns its place, and nothing goes out that we wouldn't put our name to. You stay in control of how far any of it goes, from a quiet background fix to no AI at all, so you always know exactly what you are signing off and never end up the one caught out.
It's built for the people who commission and shape this work, producers and heads of production, creative directors, brand marketers, anyone carrying an ambitious idea towards something finished without the wheels coming off.
Epic used to mean bigger.
Now it means smarter.
Why come
What you'll walk out with.
- See how work that actually breaks through gets made now, built live rather than explained on a slide.
- A straight answer to what authentic even means now the tools have changed.
- Real work from real briefs, small budgets through to big, with the honest problems and how they were solved.
- The control to set how far the AI goes, so you always know what you are signing off and never end up the one caught out.
- An off-the-record chat with the Tungsten team about what you're actually wrestling with. Plus food and drinks, which, let's be honest, is half the reason anyone turns up to these things.
Last year at Digifest
We made the case.
This year we make the work.
Year one was a panel and a room full of “we didn't know you could do that”. Here is what it looked like, and the full session if you want the argument in their own words.
The two-minute wrap-up
What last year felt like, in short
The full replay
The whole session, start to finish
The details
- When
- Thursday 1 October 2026, 1.30 to 3.30pm
- Where
- Tungsten Studios, Unit 8, Armley Nano Park, Leeds LS12 2BJ
- Format
- In person, around 40 people, recorded for later. Talk, live build and networking with food and drink.
On the day
- 01Arrival and drinks
- 02A short opening to frame the session
- 03Andrew Beniston's argument for hybrid, and the real work behind it
- 04The live build, one real brief made whole, shot real then augmented
- 05Questions, including the ones you're too scared to ask
- 06Networking, drinks and studio time, the LED volume up close