Nobody wants to watch your building

There is a default look to corporate video and everybody can feel it. Wide shot of the building. Reception. A lift. Someone walking down a corridor holding a folder they are not reading. Two people at a whiteboard pointing at nothing. Music that sounds like a laptop advert from 2014.

None of it is badly made. Most of it is competent. It just tells you nothing, because a building cannot say anything and a stock gesture cannot either.

The corporate half of what we do is bigger than the commercial half, and it is seen by more of the people who matter: the staff, the board, the person deciding whether to take the job. It is the least glamorous work and it is the work most likely to be watched all the way through by somebody with a real decision to make. That is worth taking seriously.

The hospital film was shot outside the hospital

Health City is a hospital in Grand Cayman that does cardiac and orthopaedic surgery for people who fly in from across the region. The obvious film is the theatre, the equipment, the corridors, a surgeon in scrubs looking capable.

We shot almost none of that.

The brand film was made out in the world instead. Away from the ward, because a hospital's case is not really about the hospital. It is about the fact that someone is walking around out there who would not be, and they are doing ordinary things in ordinary places, and you would never know. Point the camera at a building and you get a building. Point it at a person a few years after the thing that nearly stopped them and you get the argument.

The same logic runs through the Total Health commercial. It is built around the people who use the clinic rather than the room they walk into.

No voiceover if the person can say it themselves

A voiceover is a way of telling an audience what to think. Sometimes there is no alternative, and a good one earns its place. But the moment a real person can say the thing, the voiceover becomes the weaker option, because a person saying it is far harder to disbelieve.

The patient films we made for 3Spine are the plainest version of this. One interview, told straight to camera, in the subject's own words, with nothing laid over the top explaining what you are supposed to take from it. No music swelling under the good bit. The only editorial decision that matters is which sentences survive, and that is a decision you make honestly or not at all.

It is also harder than writing a script, which is part of why so much corporate video does not do it. You have to earn the interview, sit in it long enough for the person to stop performing, and then be willing to cut your favourite line because it was not true.

The constraints are real and they are fine

Corporate work comes with a brand book, an approvals chain and sometimes a legal review. People complain about this. I do not, particularly.

If you have brand guidelines, we work to them: type, colour, lower thirds, and how the logo is allowed to behave. If you do not have any, we make something consistent and hand over the project files so it can be matched next time. A film that ignores the brand book gets remade, which costs more than reading it would have.

Approvals are slower and they are also why the internal audience trusts the result. The harshest viewers a corporate film has are the staff, because they already know whether the thing it says is true. You cannot light your way past that. You can only avoid claiming something the people watching know to be false.

What it comes down to

A corporate film that looks like a corporate film has usually been made by pointing a camera at the company. The ones that work have been made by pointing it at somebody the company did something for, and then getting out of the way.

Nobody wants to watch your building. They will watch a person.