From one man walking to a new way of building a brand

In 1965, the story of UC Irvine was told by a single man walking across a barren landscape.

Founding Chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. strolls through what looked more like a moonscape than a campus, the camera following him for almost half an hour, in "Birth of a Campus," a public affairs program that KNBC produced and televised the week before nearly 1,600 students attended their first classes on Oct. 4, 1965.

Architect William Pereira's buildings rise from the dust like brutalist monoliths - concrete slabs angled at the sky, postmodern and severe, structures that seem to have landed rather than been built. There is almost nothing else. No students. No trees. No noise but the wind.

Aldrich simply walks and talks, his voice steady with conviction, the camera trained on him with the patience of a different era. No music. No graphics. No cuts. Just a man, a camera and a university that existed mostly in his imagination.

The footage was primitive by today's standards. But Aldrich's vision was revolutionary for its time.

Sixty years later, that vision has come full circle. UC Irvine is a world-class research university teeming with 38,000 students. The lush campus is vibrant with activity, with research and scholarship placing it at the forefront of innovation.

Among other accomplishments, UC Irvine excels in the application of artificial intelligence to nearly all facets of life - healthcare, education, economics, you name it. One use is to advance digital storytelling, which leads us to UC Irvine's 60^th anniversary video, a striking evolution from "Birth of a Campus."

UC Irvine's Strategic Communications team set out to mark the university milestone with a very different kind of production - and in doing so, inadvertently crafted a mirror image of that 1965 broadcast. Where Aldrich had one tool - his voice - this team assembled an entirely new creative environment. Where the original was linear and slow, the new process was iterative and accelerated. Where "Birth of a Campus" was known for its extended takes, the 60^th anniversary video was built through dozens of rapid cycles of testing, discarding and refinement.

The key difference: AI.

Working with Beall Applied Innovation's NarrA.I.tive Story Studio, the Strategic Communications team members didn't simply add AI to an existing workflow; they rebuilt the workflow around it. Scripts were prototyped and stress-tested within hours. Voice-over directions were explored and compared. Music compositions were generated, evaluated and replaced. The impact circles visual system - a concept gestating for nearly two years on actual napkins and in whiteboard scribbles - was finally brought to life through motion and gradient transitions that expanded the university's entire color palette.

What had once taken weeks now took days. What had once required full commitment before feedback was now testable before anything was finalized.

But the most significant outcome wasn't speed - it was clarity. As Shoba Spencer, UC Irvine's assistant vice chancellor for marketing and brand experience, put it, AI didn't replace creativity; it expanded the space where creativity could happen. The team's rhythm became what members called an "AI-human waltz," with machine speed and human instinct trading off: AI generating possibilities, humans deciding which ones resonated and which ones rang false.

The result wasn't just a better video. It was, unexpectedly, a stronger brand. The process of making the piece reshaped how UC Irvine expresses itself visually and narratively - an outcome no traditional, linear production could have delivered at the same depth or speed.

Daniel Aldrich walked an empty campus in 1965 and described a university that didn't yet exist. In 2026, a creative team used tools he couldn't have imagined to describe a university still in the act of becoming.

The generative AI tool Claude assisted in the creation of this story.