Toys in professional presentations?

Playmobil for a serious presentation??Really?

I gave a talk at a conference last month that was... difficult.?Kind of a mournful reflection that the work the conference does is far less valued and definitely less noticed than it was two decades ago.?Even in the places where the technology is used endlessly - you're likely seeing this via HTML somehow right now - its best practices have been abandoned or watered down. I needed visuals that would keep the audience involved with that story

Telling the story with toys accomplished a few key things:

• For something fun or neutral, toys add some celebration and silliness.?For something sadder (like my talk), it softens the blow.
• You have vastly more control over the toys in your photos than you are likely to have over stock photography, even when sets of photos are available. Of course, you can have more control by drawing or animating yourself from scratch.
• It's easy to create a set of related images.?(Stop-motion animation is possible but hard.)
• Toy crowd scenes are okay to shoot even in a pandemic.

It's a lot of work, and it may not be appropriate for all situations. Your company may have ahem its own branding guidelines or think toys are, well, for kids. This approach opens up a huge variety of new possibilities for storytelling, though.

In future installments, I'll be looking at how Playmobil specifically fits this model, technical and photographic issues in making it work, and planning out storytelling with visual metaphors.