Market Insights

Visual direction

How we would like to film the six explainers, and how a single episode is built. Part one is the look on the floor, part two is the shape of an episode. Where something is still a choice rather than a plan, it is marked and links through to the open points.

Where we film

On Thursday we start on the empty floor. The speaker has the room to themselves, nobody walks through the shot, and there is no colleague behind them who has to agree to being filmed. On a day with three explainers that saves takes. At the end of Thursday we decide together whether to stay there on Friday or move.

A floor without furniture can sound bare, and it will not be. The angles, a few props and the light do most of the work. We would rather dress one quiet spot properly, together with you, than chase a livelier room and lose the control over it. And if we do move on Friday, the look stays the same. The floor is the foundation anyway, not the whole picture: an episode also carries b-roll and the explainer graphics we build from your own visuals.

What we are afterthe register, not the shots

Eight frames that together describe the feeling. Five are ours, three are references from elsewhere, and they are marked as such. Not shots we will copy, but the things we keep coming back to. The word under each one is what it is doing, and those words come back in the set-ups below.

A longer listto go through together in the prep week

These are not the direction, they are frames worth looking at. The word underneath says what we are pointing at, not what the whole frame should be. Some of them are darker than we would shoot, and that is fine, they are here for the posture or the angle. Numbered so we can drop them quickly together.

introducing someone without a look to camera

The roomwhere we would build

The empty floor from our location visit, with the backdrop, the stool and one light placed into it. A rough preview of the idea, not a photograph of the day itself.

It looks bare here, and on purpose: this is the floor plus the three things that have to be there. What it does not show yet is the light and the props, and that is where most of the finish comes from. A second light separates you from the backdrop, the window stays in the frame, and a few objects from your own office give the corner something to be. Those we would rather pick together with you than bring along ourselves.

You look into the lens of the camera straight in front of you, not at someone sitting beside it. These are explainers and the question is already on screen, so there is nobody to answer to: you are speaking to the viewer. The other camera stands to the side and catches you in profile, which is what we cut to partway through an answer.

Both run at the same time, so nothing moves and nobody is interrupted. You sit down once and talk, and we come away with three different shots of the same answer.

Straight on, the main angleInto the lens, so the viewer is spoken to directly. This one carries the series, and it is the frame a title sits in. From the sideCloser, with the window behind you fully out of focus. Depth behind, window light, close but calm. The frame we cut to inside an answer. WideThe room around you, and the people in it. Room to breathe, for the opening of an episode and the pauses between questions.

One spot, possibly a secondwe decide on Thursday

a sofa with some style, and green behind it

We build in one spot. Six episodes from exactly the same position can get monotonous, so if Thursday goes well we would like to move once and shoot somewhere with more of your building in it. These three are the places we marked during the location visit, measured through the viewfinder so we know which lens fits.

Those places are livelier, and that is the point, but they are also less predictable. More people walking past, more sound, less control over the light. So we would rather earn it: Thursday on the quiet floor first, and if that runs the way we expect, we take the step on Friday.