How AI Cloning Is Redefining Sports Storytelling: Inside Mumbai Indians’ Pathbreaking WPL Campaign
When Mumbai Indians unveiled their WPL campaign, it didn’t just promote a tournament—it quietly rewrote the rules of sports marketing in India. In one of the country’s earliest large-scale uses of AI cloning, 15 international women cricketers were brought together into a single, cinematic universe without ever sharing the same physical set.
For Dipankar Mukherjee, CEO & Co-founder of Studio Blo, AI wasn’t a novelty, it was the only way to translate an epic creative vision into reality under real-world constraints of time, access, and scale.
In this conversation, Dipankar Mukherjee unpacks how AI-enabled filmmaking is reshaping sports narratives, accelerating world-building, and opening bold new possibilities for fan engagement, ethical celebrity storytelling, and the future of women-led sports narratives.
- Mumbai Indians’ WPL campaign marks one of India’s earliest large-scale uses of AI cloning in sports marketing. What sparked the idea to digitally clone 15 cricketers, and how did AI unlock a cinematic vision that traditional shoots couldn’t achieve?
Getting 15 top international athletes together right before the tournament starts, shooting a larger-than-life, epic film featuring a fleet of Maratha warrior ships and hundreds of fans at the Gateway of India, was a logistical impossibility. The need to clone was thus the easiest decision to take if the script had to be done justice to. Without using AI, it was impossible to execute this film given the resources & time.
- From performance capture to emotional realism, what were the biggest creative and technical challenges in cloning multiple athletes into a single cinematic universe and how did Studio Blo solve them at scale?
We had a world-class cinematographer & engineering team crafting this film, with a new-age director at the helm. Making the visuals evocative & the performances right was never going to be a challenge for us. The biggest technical challenge with AI was getting a hallucination-free crowd and maintaining the consistency of a dozen logos on the million-dollar Mumbai Indians jerseys. Our technical team pulled off a magic trick with this one.
- This campaign reimagines how sports teams can tell stories faster, bigger, and more cohesively. How do you see AI-led filmmaking changing the future of sports marketing and fan engagement globally?
We are currently working with sports franchises globally, and our realisation is that fans seek storytelling & world-building outside the gameplay. They love to watch their sporting heroes in other avatars – as animated characters, in movies, in games, as VR experiences & more. The future of sports marketing in the post-AI era is going to move into building IPs across the content ecosystem.
- As AI enters celebrity-led storytelling, conversations around consent, likeness rights, and ethical usage become critical. What frameworks did Studio Blo put in place to ensure responsible and transparent use of AI in this project?
Our proprietary cloning platform FAIMOUS ensures a consent-first approach to cloning. We operate only as a technology layer, while the celebrity retains all rights of the clone. Data security, ownership, transparency, traceability are the pillars of our cloning methodology.
- Women’s sports in India are entering a powerful new era of visibility. How does this campaign set a precedent for showcasing women athletes in bold, cinematic, and technologically progressive ways—and what does it signal for the future of women-led sports narratives?
The Mumbai Indians WPL ad is a great showcase of showing women athletes as superheroes. The film adds a beautiful touch of Harmanpreet passing the baton to the next generation, lifting up on her shoulders a little girl who is wearing her jersey. We are now working on an epic scale film that celebrates India’s biggest woman athletes of the past. It’s an exciting project to say the least, and it would have been impossible to execute without the power of AI.
