Film Lab — saviour for brand’s visual storytelling

LAHORE: It's not just the brand that people buy but the story behind the brand that sells. In this growing age of competition, brands need to constantly work at empathising and understand their consumer needs and take effective measures of increasing recall and reaching out to consumers- hence the Visual Storytelling boot-camp. Impact Dynamics an enterprise has taken the plunge of creating a boot camp centered around Visual Storytelling in Pakistan allowing brands and creatives to unlearn and learn.

Featuring maestros from the industry, the Film Lab is a five-day intensive boot-camp - a process that helps brands with different aspects of Visual Storytelling. The fallacy- many argue that brands hire creatives/ creative agencies to work on their visuals. What many fail to understand is that the vision comes from the company, unless you are not building the right narrative, you are not connecting with the consumer- definitely not hitting home and not building the right perception or shaping recall!

Seasoned by love and understanding the different aspects of Visual Storytelling- this boot-camp is a gold pot for branding heads, SME founders, creative teams and covers Concept/Idea development, constructing narratives, video-production, visual grammar, visual design, meta tagging, Facebook Carousel, Facebook Canvas, IG Stories, Social media platforms for running businesses/telling stories, Ad campaigns for national and global outreach, direction, non-narrative storytelling, editing on Adobe Lightroom, Premiere pro, Photoshop and Illustrator.

The team behind this boot-camp -Impact Dynamics (Maryam Arshad Director and CEO, Kiran Fatima Film-Maker and Consultant at ID and Maidah Arshad-Communications Lead) started working on this boot-camp since October last year. This boot-camp allowed the marriage of technology with marketing, filmmaking and photography to allow brands to breath new life in their perspective and outlook.

The boot-camp features experts from the industry, including Harris Rasheed (Director), Shehzil Mali(Designer and Illustrator), Kohi Marri (Photographer+Film-maker), Natasha Zubair (Photographer), Faraz Hamidi(Chief Creative Officer Hamidi Partnerships), Imran Ghazali (Digital Marketer), Nur Nasreen (ex-News Producer- Patriot Act on Netflix), Irfan Junejo (Youtuber) and Nasir Khan (Director).

The Day One kicked off with Harris Rasheed’s session where he immersed everyone in an activity which aligned their passion with their current brand and helped to rebuild a narrative around their brand. Followed by Shehzil’s session aimed at helping brands engage via Visual Design.

Day-2 started with Kohi Marri’s session on Visual Grammar. Kohi walked the brands through his featured work and helped brands to understand storytelling via Visuals following which all brands showcased their work for critique. Natasha Zubair took lead in the second half on Day-2 where she led a hands on session on the technical aspects of photography. The participants worked on Lightroom and were given feedback on their work.

Irfan Junejo flew in from Karachi to further help brands with their content creation. An insightful three-hour session covered “telling stories instead of selling” understanding the video dynamics of content creation and technical aspects of what goes into creating an appealing and engaging video for a particular brand’s product or service.

The second half marked the usually missed-out-on tools for Visual Storytelling on SM handles- Facebook’s Carousel, Canvas,360 besides covering IGTV, IGStories, Tik Tok and Twitter. Everyday marks as a prerequisite for the next day. The participating brands include Careem, Jazz, Kitchen Cuisine, Bera, CCL Pharmaceuticals, Change Mechanics, Miles for Smiles etc.

The boot-camp is being conducted with support from CoLabs and community, outreach and media partners including Jang News, City FM 89, Bramerz, Momentum Tech Conf, APWM, Mosawi, Red Tale and Pakistan Talent Fund.