On a cold, windy autumn day, inside a bar on a university campus, the film society gathered any film enthusiast it could find for its first event. Two aspiring creatives, who didn’t know each other yet, got talking about their desire to make films and, more specifically, their desire to tell stories.

That’s where we met.

Corporate video wasn't a path we planned. It was one we grew into.

On our first corporate shoot, the marketing manager’s brief to us was: “We just don’t want it to feel too corporate.”

Corporate video was still a relatively new world to us at the time, but we understood exactly what she meant. Let’s not play it safe. Let’s not be afraid to be heard. Let’s not just fall in line with how companies are expected to communicate.

So we went back to the fundamentals, sat down and examined what makes an audience invested in a story.

Two things we learned were that humans are great lie detectors and that structure alone wasn’t enough. The story could make sense, but we know when someone's just rehearsing a speech that sounds good on paper but isn't really meant when they say it.

So we started looking for the moments that couldn't be rehearsed: the way someone spoke when they forgot about the camera, an endearing interaction in the office or the details of a space and what they revealed about the people inside it.

That first client came back and offered us a monthly retainer.

We had started out just wanting to create stories. Then corporate filmmaking made us realise the power of telling the ones already unfolding around us.

Because the best stories don’t feel rehearsed. They were told like a good campfire story, to people who leaned in because they didn’t just hear the story, they felt it.

And we think that essence hasn’t changed.

Corporate videos don’t have to feel corporate.