Ignition Partners
An introductory promotional video for Ignition Partners, a boutique venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle.
The objective of this introductory promotional video was to communicate the important support role venture investors play in successful startups while keeping the focus on the founders, who are the true protagonists in every venture story. Since that didn’t have a high degree of difficulty I decided to build the animated portion of the piece around the single most depressingly cliched object in the startup universe: the whiteboard.
One of my creative mantras (the single most important survival skill I learned as a working screenwriter) is that where there is cliche there is opportunity. The whiteboard is a cliche precisely because it’s so important in the iterative process at the heart of every startup. The challenge was to use the whiteboard in a vital, fresh and visually compelling way.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to figure out that challenge alone because I had the services of ultra-talented animator and illustrator Tommaso de Sanctis at my disposal. Tommaso is one of those collaborators who makes every idea better than you initially imagined. Developing the look of the animation with Tommaso was hands down the most uncertain, exciting and creatively satisfying phase of the production.
Three other collaborators were absolutely essential to pulling this thing off:
First, my go-to cinematographer Jesse Dana, who, in addition to being crazy good at his job is one of the single nicest guys you’ll ever meet.
Second, Magali Zadoff, an amazing After Effects pro who had the unenviable task of bringing life to illustrations without stepping outside the limitations of our “stop motion” design conceit.
Third, Grammy and Emmy winning studio engineer and music producer Geoff Sanoff who only says yes to my projects because he’s one of my best friends. Geoff scored this piece perfectly and went above and beyond given his crazy schedule of better paying gigs.
Of course, anyone who does commercial creative work knows that you can’t do anything interesting or out-of-the-box without an open-minded and supportive client. Ignition managing partner Nick Sturiale, the point person for this project, said on day one that he wanted to produce something unique and truthful that communicated Ignition’s founder-first philosophy. He gave great feedback and showed tremendous faith and patience during the entire process.