The KFC spec ad was the first full 3D production Nairoreel finished. Built at the end of 2024, no client, just a self-set goal: go through the whole pipeline and see where things stood.
That meant everything in Blender, then DaVinci Resolve for editing and sound design. The renders were too heavy for the laptops, so the heavier jobs went to Google Colab and came back locally. It came together. A fully animated 3D commercial, drive-thru environments, product visualization that reads like a real ad. It set the baseline for everything after.
The KFC spec ad isn't photorealistic. The world is low-poly and cubic, closer to a miniature than a simulation.
The idea came from personal experience. I'd visited a few KFC locations around Nairobi and kept noticing how fast the drive-thru moved. Under five minutes for a two-piece order, consistently. That became the brief we set ourselves.
The ad puts two drive-thrus side by side. KFC's side shows cars moving through and pulling away clean. The other side shows the familiar thing: long queues, honking, nothing moving. The stylized world let us push colour and composition further than a realistic render would have, which made the contrast readable at a glance.