“Video-video” often not, and there’s a lot of work we do that the client is excited about making that you just know nobody will ever watch, but hey they’re paying the invoices and good excuse to hone the craft.

And to your point the funny thing about fashion and narrative-style film/video is that when it’s a single frame of a skinny lady making a contorted pose in the middle of a crazy scene, you’ll accept that as given in a single image, but suddenly when you actually have to flesh out the world she’s in and try to create an implicit narrative around it to keep the viewer interested (instead of just a vague moody simulacrum of depth) it falls apart; when fashion people talk about “story” they are usually referencing the relationship between particular garments and poses between group still images, without any regard for what that word means in the larger narrative sense re: it being the key to human’s communication and attention.

I think there’s more an opportunity to rethink the problem stills are solving, and if our current solutions are still the most interesting and medium-appropriate ways to address those.

Like say we’re talking functional e-commerce imagery to sell you a specific sweater. What’s the best way to communicate the weight and flow of that sweater: through a 1/125th of a second of it puffed up to show its shape, or seeing how it actually flows and how the weight responds to manipulation in real time. Why deprive ourselves of all of that rich lighting and movement and color dynamics information our brains use to understand what we’re seeing, just because traditionally we’ve used ink smeared on wood pulp.