The Electronic Derwent — Cole & Mason Launch Film

The Challenge: The Electronic Derwent is a product you have to see working to understand. One hand. One press. It grinds. That's hard to communicate in a still and even harder in a list of features. The film needed to demonstrate the product while making it desirable, not just explain what it does.

It also had to be hyper-real. Built for a large trade show screen, every surface would be scrutinised, and anything that looked like a render would undermine the product.

The Creative Solution: Valiant came with a storyboard and a clear brief. What I brought was the vision for what it becomes once it moves, and it was built around a simple principle: don't show everything at once. Hold things back. Build anticipation. Give the good stuff room to land.

That is the part a board can't hold. It tells you what the film wants to be, but not where a beat lands, how long to hold tension before paying it off, or which shot needs another six frames to breathe. Those decisions are the film, and they only appear once things start moving. Which is why the storyboard stage is the moment to bring an animator in, rather than after it's signed off.

It gets tested in the animatic before anything is rendered. No lighting, no materials, just timing, camera and the order things arrive in. It's the cheapest place on the whole job to change your mind.

The animatic also establishes the crops. Every shot was designed to work across landscape for trade shows, YouTube and LinkedIn, and vertical for Instagram, TikTok and the rest. Decide that early and it costs nothing. Decide it after rendering and you're doing it again.

Music was built into the edit from the start. Camera moves, cuts and transitions were timed to the track rather than added afterwards. Even the ending changed during development, exactly the sort of decision you want to make while everything is still grey boxes.

The camera carries most of the storytelling. Strong compositions keep the product where the eye wants it, while fluid animation keeps the film moving without becoming frantic. Captions handle the key messages for silent playback.

The design follows the product. Close enough to appreciate the brushed steel, machined edges and clarity of the glass. Long enough for those details to register. Then the features get their moments: the grind setting turning, the adjustment moving, the mechanism actually working.

And finally, the payoff. Salt and pepper falling through the light, simulated in X-Particles so thousands of individual grains tumble and scatter naturally. A shallow depth of field and macro-style focus falloff make the shot read as photography rather than animation.

That was important for Cole & Mason. Their visual world is live action, food photography and film, so the CG needed to sit alongside it without looking like the odd one out. Real lens behaviour. Photographic depth of field. Studio lighting rules. Hyper-real, rather than hyper-CG.

The Production: The hero shot also happened to be one of the hardest to render. Glass filled with salt is about as unforgiving as CG gets. Light bends through the body, thousands of grains catch and redirect it, and every surface affects everything around it. Nearly a week of render time went into the film.

The answer wasn't simply to turn the quality settings up. That's how you produce beautiful frames and miss a deadline. Instead, Redshift was tuned shot by shot, balancing realism against render time. More calculation where the camera could see the difference, less where it couldn't. Maximum realism, minimum wasted render time, which is what keeps revisions possible and the production moving.

Designing for Change: Midway through production, the product changed. A new CAD model arrived as the engineering developed, followed by further revisions. The mill I had built the film around was no longer the exact mill going to market, so every shot needed updating.

When the product is still evolving against a fixed marketing deadline, you can't eliminate change. You can only build for it. Clean scene files. Separated assets. Replaceable product models. Swappable backgrounds. It still cost a week, and there's no version of this where it doesn't cost something. But it would have been considerably longer, and a lot more painful, without that groundwork.

The Result: A film that works at trade show scale and on mute in a feed, with the master cut feeding stills and shorter edits across the wider campaign. It shows what the Electronic Derwent does, how it works and, most importantly, why you'd want one.

I took Valiant through the process from the first storyboard to the production decisions that kept the film deliverable. That's the value of getting involved at the creative stage. A storyboard shouldn't just look good in a presentation. It needs to be something you can actually build, on the schedule and budget you have.

Made with Valiant for Cole & Mason.