Viana Dental Project

Viana Dental has two practices, one in London and one in Komoka. In February 2016 we went in and shot the first round table we ever produced.

The problem the format was built for is simple. Most people with real expertise do not show it on camera. Put them at a desk, under lights, with a list of questions in front of them, and they stiffen up. The knowledge is all there, but the person is not — and that is what a viewer is watching for.

So we did not put Dr. Paulo Viana at a desk. We put a meal on a table and sat people around it. Conversation does what questions cannot, and the camera stops being the thing everyone is thinking about.

We shot it with two cameras and production sound. The second camera position meant we never had to stop the table to go back for a reaction or a second angle. The conversation kept its own pace, and the conversation is the whole product. When it was done, the work moved to the cutting room.

What came out of that one session was eight finished films — VDRoundtable01 through VDRoundtable08 — plus twelve short clips cut from the same footage for use on social. Several of the eight went through revisions, which is normal, and we cut a no-logo sample so the practice could watch the piece without branding sitting in the middle of it.

That session is why the Business Round Table exists as a service. The promise on that page — at least seven edited videos from one sitting, one to three minutes each, with bite-sized clips on top — is not a projection of what we hope to do. It is a count of what we had already delivered, for a dentist, in 2016, with room to spare.

Eight films out of one sitting sounds like a lot until you see how they are cut. The table is shot as one continuous conversation, and the editing is where it becomes separate films — one for each person who was there, drawn from the same conversation, each built around what that person actually said well. That is also why several of them came back for a second pass. A film that belongs to one participant has to serve that participant's own audience, not the group's.

The other half of the format is what it costs. A round table seats up to five professionals, either from the same company or from businesses that do not compete with each other, and the production is divided between them. Everyone leaves with their own finished videos, branded for their own business, and everyone promotes the others when they post. That is the part most people miss about it: the value is not only in the videos, it is in who else is at the table.

Viana Dental kept working with us after the roundtable. There is a 2018 version of the roundtable in the delivery folder, and in 2019 we cut an Invisalign piece for them — three years after that first session, and a different kind of story.

The format itself never stopped. As recently as October 2025 we were cutting promos for the round table in three shapes — wide, portrait and square — because the same piece now has to work in three different places before anyone watches it.

We put this job on the site because it is the clearest example we have of a shoot that produced a library instead of a video — and because the format we sell today started as one February morning at a table, before we had any idea it would become a service.

PRODUCER / DIRECTOR / EDITOR