Storm Chasers: CFB National Championship Hype

When Indiana University made a surprise run to the National Championship, and brought back its Bison mascot for the first time in nearly 60 years, we saw a rare cultural opening that begged for a creative response.

The Basement, an Indianapolis-based creative agency, produced a cinematic short imagining IU’s Bison charging into the eye of a hurricane, a visual metaphor born from a real behavioral fact: bison instinctively run toward storms to get through them faster. The parallel to facing the Miami Hurricanes on college football’s biggest stage was too perfect to ignore.

But what makes this project especially notable is how it was made.

This wasn’t a quick AI prompt or novelty experiment. The production followed a process much closer to a traditional shoot (concepting, storyboarding, creative direction, visual development, iteration, and finishing) with generative AI integrated into a pipeline The Basement has been building for over a year. This marks the agency’s first public production fully integrating generative technology into a real-time cultural moment.

“We came across this cool fact that bison run toward storms to get through them faster. An uncommon characteristic in the animal kingdom, and we saw an opportunity to connect this to the Miami Hurricanes,” says Brian Phillips, co-founder of The Basement. “We’ve been working on our AI strategy and pipeline for over a year, and this became our first public production integrating generative technology. There wasn’t time, and we were sitting on an ambitious idea that could amplify a cultural moment. The choice was made.”

The result is not just a hype video for a football moment, but a proof point for how agencies can responsibly and creatively deploy AI to open new production possibilities, speed-to-market opportunities, and fresh client offerings.

“AI allowed us to respond to a cultural moment at the speed it deserved without sacrificing craft,” says Uriaha Foust, creative director of The Basement. “That’s the real opportunity: making ambitious, reactive creative not only possible, but repeatable.”

Since launch, the video has taken off across social platforms, surpassing 100,000 views in its first wave of sharing, including a shoutout from IU’s beloved Martha “the Mop Lady,” further cementing the piece as a fan-fueled moment during Indiana’s historic run.