We've filmed hundreds of interviews over the years, and there's something that happens surprisingly often when we sit someone down in front of a camera and ask them to explain what their company does.
They suddenly start speaking an entirely different language - one that only people within the walls of their company have heard before.
A person who was perfectly conversational five minutes earlier starts telling us about their company's innovative solutions, unwavering commitment to excellence, and ability to leverage industry-leading expertise to deliver exceptional value.
Okay. But what do you actually do?
It's not that those things are necessarily untrue. It's that nobody talks like that in real life. And when you're trying to make a brand video that feels authentic, interesting, and genuinely human, corporate language can make even the most passionate person sound like they're reading directly from a marketing brochure.
At Bunker Hill Media, a huge part of our work involves interviewing real people and turning those conversations into documentary-style brand films. We want our interview subjects to feel prepared, confident, and knowledgeable about what they're discussing. But we also want them to sound like themselves.
Your website and your brand video have different jobs. They shouldn't necessarily sound the same.
Your Website Copy Isn't An Interview Script
There's nothing inherently wrong with polished corporate language. Your website needs to communicate information clearly, explain your services, establish credibility, and help potential customers understand whether your company is right for them. Depending on your industry, that might involve technical terminology, carefully chosen messaging, or language that's been reviewed by several different departments.
That's all fine.
The problem starts when someone assumes that because a paragraph works on a website, it should also work coming out of someone's mouth.
Written language and spoken language are fundamentally different. When we're reading, we can pause, reread a sentence, scan a heading, or take a moment to understand something complicated. When we're watching a video, the information is moving past us in real time. We don't necessarily have the opportunity to stop and unpack a sentence full of industry terminology before the next thought arrives.
And perhaps more importantly, we're looking at a human being while they're saying it.
If we're watching a founder talk about why they started a company, we expect them to sound like someone remembering an experience that actually mattered to them. We don't expect them to deliver the mission statement from the company's website word for word.
That's why we rarely want someone to sit down and recite the language their marketing team has already written. We want to hear how they would explain the same ideas if they were talking to someone sitting across from them at lunch.
The information might be identical. The delivery can make an enormous difference.
The Best Answers Often Come After Someone Stops Trying To Sound Professional
Something we encounter during interviews is the difference between someone's first answer and what they say after we ask them to explain it a little differently.
The first answer might be technically perfect. It includes the company's official language, hits the important talking points, and communicates exactly what the organization wants people to know. If we were reviewing it as a paragraph of website copy, we might not change a thing.
But on camera, it can feel completely lifeless.
So we'll ask a follow-up. Maybe we ask them to explain what that actually means. Maybe we ask for a specific example. Maybe we simply say, "Okay, but how would you explain that to someone who doesn't work in your industry?"
And suddenly, we get a completely different answer.
Instead of telling us the company is committed to creating meaningful customer relationships, someone starts talking about a customer they've known for years. Instead of explaining that their organization delivers innovative solutions, an employee tells us about a problem they spent months trying to solve. Instead of repeating the company's mission statement, a founder tells us about the experience that made them want to start the business in the first place.
Now we're getting somewhere.
The second answer isn't necessarily more accurate than the first. It's simply more interesting, more specific, and usually much easier for an audience to connect with.
This is one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on actually conducting interviews rather than just recording answers. Our job isn't to sit behind the camera and check off a list of approved talking points. It's to listen carefully, recognize when there's a more compelling explanation hiding underneath the first answer, and help the person sitting across from us get there.
We Want To Hear How You Actually Talk
One of our favorite things about interview-driven filmmaking is that everyone communicates differently.
Some people are incredibly animated. They talk with their hands, laugh in the middle of their answers, and get visibly excited when they start discussing something they care about. Other people are quieter and more thoughtful. They might pause for a few seconds before answering, choose their words carefully, or tell a story in a way that feels understated but incredibly sincere.
Both can be fantastic on camera.
What we don't want is for either of those people to feel like they need to become a completely different version of themselves because there's a camera pointed at them.
We've talked before about why we usually send interview questions in advance. We want people to have time to prepare, think about their answers, and feel confident discussing their work. But we specifically tell people not to memorize anything, because preparation and memorization are two completely different things.
We want you to know what you're talking about. We just don't want you to rehearse every sentence until all the personality has disappeared.
If you're naturally funny, be funny. If you get excited about the technical details of your work, let us see that enthusiasm. If you have a particular way of explaining something that makes perfect sense to the people around you, don't automatically replace it with corporate language because you think it sounds more professional.
The way you communicate is part of what makes you interesting.
And if we're making a brand film that's supposed to help an audience understand the people behind a company, stripping away those personalities is probably the last thing we should be doing.
Corporate Buzzwords Don't Actually Tell Us Very Much
Let's talk about some of the phrases that show up constantly in corporate messaging.
"We're passionate about delivering excellence."
"We put our customers first."
"We're committed to innovation."
"We pride ourselves on our collaborative approach."
None of those statements is necessarily wrong. The problem is that they're so broad they could apply to almost any company in almost any industry.
If you remove the company name from the sentence and it could just as easily appear on a competitor's website, it's probably not telling us very much about what makes your organization interesting.
This becomes especially obvious when we're building a brand video.
If someone tells us their company puts customers first, our next question is probably going to be something like, "Okay, what does that actually look like?"
Because that's what we want to know.
Maybe it means employees are empowered to solve customer problems without asking three different managers for permission. Maybe it means someone stayed late to help a client meet an important deadline. Maybe it means a pharmacist remembers the names of customers who come into the store every week.
Those are actual examples of what a company values.
And they're so much more compelling than simply announcing the value itself.
One of the most important things we try to do during interviews is move people away from describing their company's values in abstract terms and toward explaining how those values show up in real life.
Don't just tell us you care about your customers. Tell us a story that makes us believe it.
That's where the best brand videos start to separate themselves from generic corporate content.
You Can Be Professional Without Sounding Corporate
I think there's a misconception that speaking naturally on camera somehow means sacrificing professionalism.
It doesn't.
We're not asking executives to start making jokes they wouldn't normally make. We're not asking scientists to oversimplify their research until it becomes inaccurate. We're not asking healthcare professionals to abandon important terminology or make statements that haven't been properly reviewed.
We're asking people to communicate like knowledgeable human beings.
There's a difference between using technical language because it's necessary and using complicated language because you think it makes you sound more impressive.
We work with organizations that have genuinely complex stories to tell. Sometimes the subject matter involves healthcare, technology, technical processes, or specialized services that require precise explanations. We understand that certain terms have specific meanings and can't simply be replaced with something more conversational.
But even complicated ideas can usually be explained in ways that feel approachable.
A scientist can explain an incredibly sophisticated process while still sounding enthusiastic about their work. A CEO can discuss the company's strategy without delivering an investor presentation. A nonprofit leader can explain a complicated social issue while keeping the focus on the people affected by it.
The goal isn't to make everyone sound casual.
The goal is to make everyone sound like themselves, communicating clearly to the audience the video is actually intended to reach.
And sometimes that requires reminding people that they don't need to sound impressive. They already know what they're talking about. They just need to explain it.
The Edit Is Where We Make It Polished
Here's another reason we don't need people to speak in perfectly constructed corporate sentences during an interview: the interview isn't the finished video.
That's what post-production is for.
When we film an interview, we're usually spending around 30 minutes with someone, sometimes longer depending on the project. During that time, we're asking questions, following interesting answers, clarifying ideas, and giving people room to explain things in their own words.
Not every sentence needs to be usable.
Someone might start an answer, realize they want to explain it differently, and begin again. They might tell a great story that takes four minutes even though we ultimately only need 15 seconds of it. They might say something incredibly meaningful in the middle of a longer answer that wanders through three different subjects.
That's all completely normal.
When we get into the edit, we're looking for the strongest pieces of those conversations and figuring out how they fit into the larger story. We're building structure, creating transitions, tightening ideas, and pairing the interview material with visuals that help bring everything to life.
We don't need every person to deliver a perfect 20-second sound bite on the first try.
We need them to give us thoughtful, genuine material that we can work with.
That's also why we put so much effort into pre-production. For larger brand films, we often develop a target script before production begins. That gives us a framework for the story we're trying to tell, the ideas we need to communicate, and the interview subjects who can help us get there.
But the target script isn't something we hand to people and ask them to memorize.
The structure comes from our preparation. The actual language comes from the people we're interviewing.
That combination allows us to create a polished, intentional brand film without making everyone sound like they're reading a script.
Your Brand Video Should Show Us Who You Are, Not Just Tell Us What You Do
There's a bigger reason we care about all of this, and it goes beyond whether someone uses too many corporate buzzwords.
A good brand video should help an audience understand something about the people and organization they're watching.
Of course, we want viewers to know what the company does. That's important. If someone watches a three-minute brand film and still has absolutely no idea what the organization offers, we've probably missed something.
But we also want them to understand what makes that company different.
What do the people care about? Why do they do this work? What are they proud of? What challenges have they overcome? What do they find exciting about their jobs? Why should someone want to work with them, buy from them, support them, or become part of their team?
Those are the things that make a brand feel human.
And they're difficult to communicate when everyone is speaking in the same carefully approved corporate language.
Your website can explain your services, list your capabilities, outline your process, and provide all the detailed information someone needs to evaluate your company.
Your brand video has an opportunity to do something different.
It can let people actually meet you.
The Best Brand Videos Sound Like People, Not Companies
We spend a lot of time during pre-production figuring out what a company wants to communicate. We work with clients to develop interview questions, establish the creative direction, identify the right people to put on camera, and build a framework for the story we're trying to tell.
All of that planning matters.
But once someone sits down in front of our cameras, we don't want them worrying about whether every sentence sounds like it belongs in the company's official messaging guide.
We want them to talk.
We want them to explain what they do in their own words. We want them to tell us stories. We want to hear the enthusiasm in their voice when they start discussing something they're proud of. We want to understand what makes them care about the work.
And when they inevitably give us an answer that sounds a little too much like it was pulled directly from their company's About Us page, we're probably going to ask them to explain it again.
Not because the first answer was wrong.
Because we know there's probably a much more interesting answer underneath it.
Your website can tell people what your company does. Your brand video should help them understand the people who make it worth caring about.
