Three companies, one film, no budget: how I decided what actually made the cut

A few years ago I was commissioned to produce a corporate film for Densiq Group — the parent company behind three subsidiaries: Densiq AB, VM Kompensator, and DEPAC. Three businesses, three product areas, three customer groups. One film.

The brief looked simple on paper: represent each company and what they do. The film would run on LinkedIn, at events, at open houses — anywhere the group showed up. A B2B audience, broadly spread, usually without time to dig in.

The budget was minimal and was allocated for rental of mid tier equipment, transportation and accommodation. Everything else was filmed, directed, and edited by me, solo.

It turned out to be one of the most instructive communication projects I've worked on. Not because I had creative freedom — but because the constraints forced decisions I would otherwise have postponed.

The temptation: give everyone equal space

When you have three companies to represent, the first instinct is to split the screen time evenly. Same seconds per subsidiary. Same weight in every section. Same visual emphasis on every product line.

That instinct is wrong.

A film that tries to say equally much about everything rarely lands on anything. The viewer's attention is finite. When you distribute it evenly across three things, none of them get the weight they need to stick.

It's the same problem that sinks most corporate films: the desire to include everything ends up making nothing stand out.

What I did instead

I decided the film would carry a single throughline — about the group as a whole — and each subsidiary would get space to be specific rather than representative. One strong scene per company instead of three weak ones each.

That meant uncomfortable choices. Some products didn't make it. Some sites didn't get filmed. Those calls were uncomfortable. They were also what made the film watchable.

Three things that mattered more than the budget

Owning the creative process end to end. Filming, directing, and editing the whole thing myself meant I didn't lose the production to the compromises that happen when every decision gets routed through a committee. That didn't mean making choices in isolation — it meant the creative direction could stay coherent from the first shot to the final cut. For a low-budget production, that's often worth more than an extra camera operator.

Getting people to want to help. The sales teams at each subsidiary had to facilitate access to the industrial sites. That required them to understand why the film was worth their time. Once they saw what we were building — and saw themselves as co-creators rather than production support — doors opened that would otherwise have stayed closed. Low-budget film lives or dies on people's investment, not on the money.

Designing for multiple outputs from a single shoot. From the same footage I produced several different versions: a main film, shorter formats for LinkedIn, cuts specific to each subsidiary. That wasn't a happy accident — it was planned from day one. If you film with only one final product in mind, you've already wasted 80% of the material.

What this has to do with Lans & Co

At Lans & Co we help companies get more out of their trade fairs and speaking opportunities. It's the same problem as the corporate film — finite time, finite attention, an audience that doesn't wait.

The questions are the same:

• What's worth saying when you only have a few minutes?

• What needs to come out, even if it feels important?

• How do you design a presence so that one investment produces multiple outputs, not just one?

The third question is the one most companies miss — and it's where film thinking becomes essential, not optional. At a fair, on a stage, at a launch, there's footage worth capturing, and most of it ends up unused or unusable because nobody planned for it. When we build a strategy for a client at Lans & Co, what gets filmed — and how, and what it becomes afterwards — is part of the plan, not something bolted on at the end. Sometimes that means we're behind the camera ourselves. Sometimes it means we direct the production team a client has already hired. Either way, the strategic thinking about visual content is built in from day one, because that's where most of the post-event value gets won or lost.

A trade fair booth is a corporate film stretched across three days. A keynote is a corporate film with no edit. And as with film: what separates what works from what doesn't is rarely the budget. It's what you choose to focus on, and what you have the courage to leave outside.