Mike Posner and the power of storytelling

As a Product Designer I’m used to shifting pixels, kerning letter forms, and asking users ‘what they expected when they pressed that button’. As a result, words don’t come as naturally to me as others, but I saw a video this week that I felt really captured what we are trying to say at Seenit. It proved that you don’t always need enormous budgets and expensive cameras to tell a story, and that sometimes the stories worth telling can be filmed on a phone.

If you haven’t seen it already, Mike Posner released a music video for ‘Move on’, a track from his upcoming third studio album. For me, it was up there with one of the most remarkable music videos I’ve ever seen. Recently, videos like ‘This is America’ and ‘Say Something’ gained widespread critical acclaim, but ‘Move On’ has something different. It’s raw. It’s genuine. It’s inspiring.

In order for a video to be engaging it doesn’t necessarily need expensive and/or elaborate equipment. More often than you think, footage filmed on a phone feels so much more real, so much more relatable. In ‘Move On’, the rawness of the footage used captures the moments a film crew would have missed. You wonder if the same level of raw human emotion would have been achieved if the video was shot horizontally on 4K cameras with a film crew following Mike Posner around. The fact that in so many shots he is alone, filming himself, opening up on camera is what for me makes this video so authentic. That’s what gave me goosebumps watching it.

There are so many stories out there worth telling where the viewer could gain a much more personal perspective if the story was told alone and without a camera crew. This is the power of Seenit and allows our customers to do so much awesome stuff. As an example, think of a global company that wants to create a video about how good it is to work within the organisation. Rather than spend a huge amount of money and time getting a film crew to ask a hand selected group of employees what they like, why not ask everyone to film on their phones and share the things that matter the most to them? Why not ask them to share their stories worth telling? Why not get a global perspective? You might just be surprised by the outcome.