INBOUND 2025 Intro Video

Get the people going (but in an AI-first kind of way)

Role

Art Director, Motion Designer

Industry

Software

Duration

2 months

The Brief

The year was 2025. INBOUND, for the first time ever was not taking place in Boston. Instead, we painted San Francisco orange as Yamini took center stage at the heart of the world's technology hub.

For IN25, our leadership team wanted an intelligent and polished AI video essay to play as a way to signal the beginning of the event and segue into Yamini's keynote. They wanted to posit recent AI advancements as a huge turning point in our history, and get people excited about the direction we are going as a company. It needed to be insightful, since the room is full of seasoned industry professionals, while staying relatively palatable (aka not being full of piping hot AI takes), since it needed to appeal to everyone there. And at this point, it was safe to say, a lot of discourse around AI had been… played out. The AI fatigue is real. It was a delicate balance, but I think we did well to pull it off.

The Process

Once we got the general idea, I took some time to develop a visual language for the video. We went pretty far out at first (think old-school ASCII images of Will Smith eating spaghetti on a MASSIVE screen in front of over 11,000 people) and eventually reined it in. Once we aligned with stakeholders on a visual treatment and an overall story (AI as a catalyst for great change in business), the video team lead & principal cinematographer Odette Santos (my partner in crime for this video) spent countless hours compiling footage of AI-related new clips and stories. From there, we spliced and diced into something coherent. Then, since it wasn't exactly right, we'd take it all apart and start fresh. It was a long process until we eventually landed on something that felt real and sounded uniquely HubSpot.

a pair of cell phones on a concrete block

a cell phone with a yellow rectangular screen

Reflections

This was a long and tough project, largely because of how wide open the brief was and how much footage we sifted through to come up with a story to tell. I think the finished result is polished and thought provoking, and seemingly played well in the room when it premiered — but check it out for yourself: