Motion for the moments that matter

Most companies get one true focal point a year. The conference, the summit, the launch: usually annual, always singular. Everyone who cares about you is watching, and so are plenty of people who barely know you exist.

That makes the event screens a strange place to save money. This is the one day you get to show what you're doing and why it matters, and to do it so well that any old Joe off the street might look up and go: that's pretty cool. Miss it and it's a year until the next one.

For a scale-up, the event is your chance to look bigger than you are. If you're eyeing investment, or acquisition, you want to look as big as possible, and premium creative is how it's done. Motion is how a twelve-person company looks like it has a motion department. An event is that department performing live, in front of the exact people you most need to convince.

Titans have the opposite problem. Nobody needs IBM or Meta to look bigger. Their challenge is that the products aren't inherently interesting to anyone outside the space; people use them constantly and think about them never. So the battle is against the corporate spiel. Apple gets millions of views on a product feature because they found a style and a voice, and invest as heavily in how they communicate as in what they ship. In industries run by a handful of giants, setting that standard is the competition.

Two battlegrounds, then: one brand fighting to look bigger, one fighting to stay interesting, both decided on the same screens.

I won't lean on this too hard, because it's obvious. Eyes go to the thing that moves. That's human wiring, and everyone in the room is running it.

The less obvious part is the signal underneath. You could have hung a static backdrop. You chose to do something more, and an audience reads that effort as belief. For a scale-up especially: these people are invested in what they're building. That registers before a single word is said.

On a budget sheet, an event reads as a single day of spend. In practice the work carries on long past the day itself: the opener gets clipped for socials, the product films go to YouTube and into launch posts, and the same pieces sit on the website doing quiet work for months afterwards.

The part I didn't expect: months after JoyConf, Storyblok's sales team was still running the product films we made, privately with prospects and in their own LinkedIn posts. Turns out a good product film teaches the people selling the product just as much as it teaches the buyer.

So the honest way to weigh the cost is against the year of use rather than the single day on screen.

Event work has one structural difference from every other kind of motion work.

A campaign can slip a week and nobody outside the building notices. An event date is public, ticketed and immovable.

That makes events high pressure environments, and companies should understand that walking in, because it shapes everything: who you hire, when you brief them, how much last-minute change the work can absorb. Ideally you give this work a month or two of headway. Reality often gives you less. On JoyConf, both product features were still in the workshop a fortnight before the event, which left about a week per film. Blunt version: absorbing that kind of compression is part of the discipline. It costs a multiple, and we can do it.

And the pressure doesn't end at delivery. Show day is live until the ending sequence: speakers drop, running orders shift, edits happen on the morning. The files ship, and then you stay on call.

The opener always gets budgeted; the gaps between things rarely do. And the gaps are where a room decides whether the day feels designed or assembled: the waiting screens, the speaker stings, the transitions, the walk-in loops. Every state the screens can be in, speaking one motion language, so the whole day reads as a single designed thing rather than a playlist.

We take that to the failure state. For JoyConf we made a 404 screen, in case anything broke.

Where we sit: we don't do the screens, and we don't set up the event. We create what's on the screens and work with the environment we're given. That environment turns out to be most of the technical craft.

An LED wall is a custom canvas with its own native resolution, set by the venue's panels and pixel pitch, and it's usually an odd number that fits no standard format. You design to that exact pixel map; stretching a 16:9 master over it is how visuals arrive soft. On a screen fifteen feet across, everything gets mastered in 4K so the quality holds at scale.

Pitch also decides how close the image survives, roughly a metre of clean viewing per millimetre, and that changes the design itself. Type that sings on a laptop dies from the third row. So: bold forms, high contrast, fewer words.

Colour behaves differently out there too. LED is emissive; it exaggerates colour and runs bright, and the wall never quite matches the monitor you designed on. You balance for the room, and then you balance again for the cameras, because most events now have a second audience on the stream, and a wall that looks gorgeous to the eye can blow out the video feed behind a speaker's face.

Then the loop craft. Ambient screens run short loops with no visible join, delivered at the wall's native resolution, in whatever format the playback rig asks for, at a frame rate that stays smooth at scale. The skill is making a loop feel alive on its fortieth repeat without pulling focus from whoever's talking.

And the multiplication. JoyConf ran Amsterdam, LA and New York. Three venues, three screens, three canvases, so every piece needed its own iteration: re-laid-out, adjusted, re-rendered per city. That's the real grunt work of event motion.

That multiplication is exactly the class of problem I build systems for. Re-formatting per venue is deterministic donkey work: same rules, different canvas. I couldn't build the engine for it at the time. I could now. The event identity baked into a tool, handed to the company, so the next venue or the last-minute schedule change gets handled in their hands, in minutes, without anything breaking the brand. The creative gets made once; the repetition gets automated.

Last October we built the full motion visual setup for Storyblok's JoyConf 2025: their first flagship event, and the first one they'd run themselves. An opener designed to go a bit wow, fireworks inside the first seconds because we wanted phones out of pockets before the first speaker walked on, a bright fantasy-tech world, all 3D. Two product films, for FlowMotion and Strata. And the full ambient set, down to that 404.

The work is on the site if you want to see it move.

The best openers are short, impactful and gone before anyone's ready, leaving the room wanting more. Which is a decent brief for the whole event.

You get one moment a year with this many eyes on you, and the work it produces keeps earning long after the room empties.