The Challenge
Marketing executives filmed their interviews on Zoom, from home offices, with whatever webcam and lighting they had lying around. No flights, no crews, no do-overs. The job was to turn that into something Cannes-worthy anyway.
The Idea
The instinct in that situation is to hide the limitation: crop tighter, add some lower thirds, hope nobody notices it’s a webcam recording. We did the opposite. If the footage couldn’t look expensive, we’d make expensive irrelevant. The insight was that constraint isn’t something you disguise, it’s something you build the concept around. A Zoom interview is static and flat, so the fix wasn’t better footage, it was giving the footage somewhere wilder to live.
The Execution
We scripted and then brought in BUCK to build full animated worlds around the Zoom footage itself, using LinkedIn’s illustrated brand style as the visual language and then pushing it somewhere weirder and more surreal than a brand style guide usually allows. The executives stayed exactly as they were filmed, boxy webcam frame and all, but the space around them came alive: color, motion, a little bit of chaos, all of it doing the emotional work the flat interview footage couldn’t do on its own. That’s the real trick behind it: the budget didn’t get us less creative work, it got us a better idea.
