Wisberg

The brief

SOTA, a London company, posted a job on Contra for product videos across 90 home appliances: one silent film of about 15 seconds at 1080p for each product, plus four to six images. The hiring ran in two stages.

Stage one was a sample film of the Wisberg SmartDose washing machine. Stage two was a finished film for one product, the Wisberg BL8000 Power Pro bagless canister vacuum, in SOTA's own house look: one bright home, the same hands in every shot, no face, no sound.

What we made

• The BL8000 film, 19.8 seconds at 1920 x 1080, silent, cut straight on motion
• The SmartDose sample, 15 seconds at 1080p, silent, one continuous move around the machine
• A product lock sheet with ten checkpoints taken from the product photos and the manual
• A look board graded to SOTA's visual guide, with the palette as hex values
• Two approval boards with a start frame and an end frame for each of the ten planned shots
• A hinge check and a motion test for the shot where the dust bin is emptied

How it works

The product lock comes first. Every still is checked against it before anything moves: a navy body (#2D3F4E) with a black base, a light grey carry handle that is never navy, the hose always plugged into the front inlet, silver ten-spoke wheels, and a rear panel with six icons.

Each shot is planned as a pair of frames, where it starts and where it ends. The stills are made first with Nano Banana 2.1 from the real product photos, approved on the boards, and only then animated with Kling 4.0, which moves between the two frames. The clips are lifted to 1080p and graded as one piece.

The look follows SOTA's guide: soft late-morning daylight, light oak and warm white walls, a jute rug, the same cream knit sleeve in every shot. The edit uses straight cuts on motion and no fades.

What we threw away

The first vacuum cut was rejected in review. The hand read toy-sized next to the machine (about 25 cm, where a real hand is closer to 18), the lid changed size between shots, the grip jumped, and in one shot the lid opened with nothing touching it.

The fix went back to the source. The BL8000 manual and the retailer's photos settled how the bin lid hinges, and the emptying became one continuous clip, so the lid and the grip cannot drift between cuts. The sofa shot was made again from scratch.