Telling a destination's story in ninety seconds

A short format imposes a discipline few people expect before trying it: every second has to earn its place, every shot has to carry either information or emotion, never a half-hearted mix of both. Telling a whole destination's story in ninety seconds is not a summarising exercise, it is an exercise in choosing.

In detail

The first step, even before picking up the camera, is deciding what will NOT be shown. A destination always has more facets than a short film can carry: we pick a single angle, a single promise, and commit to it fully rather than trying to say everything half-way.

Then comes the structure. Our short formats almost always follow the same invisible skeleton: a hook within the first three seconds, a build that rises in intensity, and an ending that leaves a strong image rather than an explicit message. Viewers rarely remember a sentence, they remember a feeling.

Sound matters as much as image, sometimes more. A well-paced edit without a soundtrack built with the same care immediately loses impact. We work on sound from the scouting stage onward, never as a simple layer added after the fact in post.

Finally, every short format is designed for ITS distribution platform, never as a simple cutdown of a longer film. A vertical frame is not a crop of a horizontal one: it is an entirely rethought composition, filmed as such from the very start.

More than once we have filmed a full day and then thrown away half the footage in the edit, because a beautiful shot added nothing to the chosen story. It stings in the moment, but it is almost always a sign that we respected the first rule: never say everything half-way.

Client feedback on these short formats often follows the same pattern: initial hesitation at a cut that seems to "move too fast", then full buy-in once the film is seen in context, on a phone, in the actual feed where it will be watched. A short format is judged on its viewing screen, never on a large editing monitor.

We also use simple tools to test our hypotheses before filming: a storyboard reduced to about ten thumbnails, sometimes just a list of keywords in the order they should appear on screen. This light preparation avoids discovering in the edit that an essential shot is missing, a costly mistake when every second counts.

A concrete example illustrates this discipline well: for a recent campaign, the client's initial brief asked us to present five different features of the same product in ninety seconds. We proposed keeping only one, the most differentiating one, and developing it fully rather than skimming over all five. The client hesitated at first, worried about "losing" important messages, before noticing the film achieved a completion rate far higher than their previous, more crowded formats. That experience sums up well what this format has taught us over time: saying less, often, helps people remember more.

We regularly train client teams in this discipline too, beyond simply delivering a film. Understanding why a short format works helps a client phrase future briefs better, and stop feeling frustrated when the agency suggests removing a message instead of adding one. This teaching takes time at the start of a collaboration, but it considerably speeds up every project that follows.

We also systematically test every short format, before its official release, on a small group of people outside the project, never involved in producing it. Their first cold reactions, often summed up in one sentence, almost always reveal whether the central message truly landed, far more reliably than the creative team's own opinion, too close to the subject to judge it with the same distance.