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LIONS BRAND FILM

MY ROLE: Creative Lead

Creative concept and treatment development, storyboard, directing live action, casting, edit, motion graphics, sound design.

2024

  • The Lions brand film opens the awards show at Cannes Lions, engages audiences on social media, and represents the brand year-round across all platforms.

    LIONS | BRAND FILM | 2023

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    Pink Poppy Flowers
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    Screenshot 2026-04-04 at 10.28.39.png

    The 2023 film worked because it showed the creative process honestly — thoughtful, painful, uncomfortable. The 2024 brief wanted to rely on that line of thinking: into the chaos, the butting heads, the tension between creatives and decision-makers, agencies and clients, marketing and finance. Humour as a tool for relief.

  • Live action was the natural evolution: real people, a real workspaces, real frustration. The goal was to strengthen identification and relatability, bringing the viewer closer to the experience. Our vision was to show a creative's entire day, start to finish. Her desk, her team, her boss, her 47 (...and counting) Slack notifications. Is this really the last round of amends? The story is told in a cyclical format tying the evening back to the start.

    POST-IT | GREAT IDEAS

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    The Post-It campaign informed our storytelling and set design — an intimate creative workspace built around a desk.

    Apple | The whole working-from-home thing

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    Drawn from Apple's workplace series — the kind of warmth and self-awareness that makes a struggling team worth watching.

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    The interplay between live action and on-screen interfaces. Characters built entirely through UI.

    OPAL | PRODUCT VIDEO

    Pink Poppy Flowers
    Pink Poppy Flowers
    Pink Poppy Flowers

    The motion language from 2023 has a new environment: the live action set design and motion elements interact within one frame.

  • The urgency, the nervousness, the chaos all needed to flow continuously between set design, acting, and motion graphics.

    GFX MockUPS WITH AI SET

    A combination of draft GFX and AI generated scenes were used in the final storyboard to get final approval on the concept.

    THE OVERHEAD SHOTS OF THE TEAM

    The AI generated overhead shots of the team's desks were the key references when it came to making decision with the set designer.

  • Screened before awards ceremonies and between talks at the 2024 Cannes Lions festival. Played across the venue throughout the week.

    The highest-engagement post on the Cannes Lions Instagram account at the time of release, and the second highest-engagement post in the account's history to date. All engagement entirely organic.

    900k views  |  20.4k likes  |  480 comments  |  4,720 shares

    It started a very important conversation about the industry's work culture.

  • The work reached more people than any brand-produced content before it. Reactions were passionate, whether positive or negative. The film brought strong emotions to the surface. It gave way to an important conversation about a problem the industry can no longer ignore.

    The original intent was to show the truth about creative work as it is. Many viewers responded positively to it, particularly those at the festival, who live this reality and came to be recognised for it.

    But a portion of the broader social audience felt exposed without relief. Experiencing the film as amplifying the struggle rather than acknowledging it. The same honesty that made the 2023 film feel like celebration landed differently without the same arc of resolution.

    As Marcus Collins writes in For the Culture, a marketer's primary goal is to influence behaviour. Even when the creative is done right on paper, integration into culture is a key element. Carving out attention is the first step, but it's our responsibility to make sure the campaign lands and resonates. The potential strategy for the future was proposed by one of the commenters: Lions should use it’s platform to step up against this working culture.

CREDITS

Creative Lead — Balint Danyi | Creative Director (Cannes Lions) — Clare Barry | Creative Director, Ascential Studios — Dina Elrayyes | Director of Photography — Marco La Nave | Second Camera — Kostis | Post-Production Supervision — Ken Coy | Production (Supervision) — Pietro Romanelli | Lead Producer & Casting — Naomi Hartridge-Dawes | Set Designer — Hany Suleiman | Lead Talent — Caroline Lee | Supporting Talent — Eni Majekodunmi | Art Director, Cannes Lions — Poppy Yeung | Production Assistant — Rhys Norman

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