John-Ivar Eidsmo
ABOUT
A fictional “smart” Norwegian cheese slicer turned into a premium subscription service — complete with slice limits, Family Sharing, Priority Slicing and an ad-free tier. Created as a satire of subscription culture, feature creep and the growing tendency to monetize products that already work perfectly well. I developed the product, campaign concept and visual world using generative AI, building consistent product references before turning them into a polished commercial with AI video, editing, UI, music and sound design. The irony: AI could make it look like a premium tech launch, but still struggled to understand how a Norwegian cheese slicer actually works. The post went viral on LinkedIn, reaching over 100 000 impressions in its first five days and sparking a discussion around subscriptions, product design and AI.
SELECTED FRAMES — 3 OF 8
PROCESS
The hard part wasn’t generating a funny AI video. It was making a product that doesn’t exist feel like it actually could. I started by defining Ostehøvel+ as a real product: the physical design, subscription model, features, interface and the overly polished tech-launch language around it. From there I generated and refined stills until the cheese slicer had a consistent enough visual identity to use as reference material for the film. Video generation was much messier. AI is surprisingly bad at understanding what a cheese slicer actually does — handles changed shape, cheese behaved strangely and the mechanics regularly fell apart. A lot was discarded. I kept the few generations that sold the illusion, cut around the failures, and built the final piece through editing, pacing, typography, sound design and grading. The final film looks intentionally effortless. Getting it there wasn’t.
Credits
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