Bringing people into your creative vision is hard. How do you do that? Well, you can wave your arms around like I’m doing in the pic above. But that only works if you’re JLO’s dance choreographer.
For me, as a Writer and Director at LinkedIn, this happens through many phases of pre-production like: briefing, scripting, location scouting, and more. But for this post, I’m going to focus on one specific tool in my Director’s binder: storyboards.
Below are twelve storyboards along with final cuts for a series of videos we created for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn. These specific videos introduce Linkedin’s top B2B trends and are used as external assets to drive viewers back to their microsite. These were also showcased at the 2022 Cannes Interactive Festival.
As a team, we use these series of illustrations to map out the sequence of shots for our story before we actually start filming. These are meant to give everyone—our clients, cast members, and production crew—a sense for exactly what we are filming and how. I use these storyboards as a key element to communicate how I want to execute my creative vision.
Here is a pic from set and my storyboards in action:
For this project, I had the privilege of collaborating with our very talented designer Ru Leng. She has a tremendous visual vocabulary and has been instrumental in turning my vomit-of-creativity-in-my-brain into something tangible on paper. How? I’ll first draw stick figure scribbles and walk her though what I’m thinking. She’ll then turn those into magical illustrations.
Check out her storyboards and then my final output. Pretty fun to see her images come to life!
95-5 Rule
Situational Awareness
Product Delusion
Earn It Or Pay It
Central Casting
Memory Corrosion
Reach Maximalism
Strategy By Subtraction
People Don’t Buy From Clowns
Peak-End Rule
Impersonalization At Scale
Performance Branding
Here are the creative folks who worked on this series:
Producer: Elani Chan
DP: Paul E. McCarthy
Writer/Director: Pari Mathur
CD: Dan Mills
Strategy: Katia Kostiukova Stewart, Lauren McGlory
Creative Partners: Rachel Abbe, Haley Pierce
Editor: Jeff Croghan
Motion: Adam Kennedy
Additional GFX, storyboards: Ru Leng
Color: Baco Bryles
Talent: Ty Heath, Peter Weinberg, Jon Lombardo, Jann Martin Schwarz