Relay — Turning Missed Meetings into Clear Decisions
A practice film for a made-up app that sits in meetings for you, so missing a call doesn't mean missing a decision.
THE BRIEF
Relay is a made-up product I created for this personal project, to practise telling a story about software. The idea: an assistant that joins your work meetings when you can't, records them, and gives you a short summary of what was decided and what you need to do.
My goal was to make the value of this kind of app obvious without listing features or using a voiceover, through a story anyone who works in a team will recognise. It had to show believable app screens and stay easy to read on a phone.
The video is about 90 seconds long.
THE APPROACH
The whole story hangs on one word: 'Friday'. At 4pm, Tolu gets a reminder that a product meeting is starting, but he's stuck on Third Mainland Bridge, 38 minutes away. Relay joins the call for him.
At 9:40 that night, a colleague asks, 'Can we lock Friday?' He needs to answer, but the meeting recording is 52 minutes long. Relay's summary gives him the answer in seconds: the decision is Friday, but only if testing is finished, and that testing is his job, due Thursday. He replies, 'Friday works, once I finish QA on Thursday,' and a task is created for him automatically. The film ends with 'Miss the meeting. Keep the meaning.'
The look is dark and calm, with one bright blue for the brand and colour-coded summary cards: green for the decision, amber for the condition, coral for his task. The traffic scene at the start is a simple illustration, so the human moment feels warm before we move into the app.
THE RESULT
A finished practice film that shows I can turn what a software product does into a short story with real tension and a satisfying ending. The same shape (problem, delay, summary, decision) works for real business apps.
DELIVERABLES
- Main video (90 seconds)
- Made-up brand and logo
- App screen design and animation
- Illustrated story scene
- On-screen text design
✦ Director's note
“The best software videos tell a story instead of giving a tour. This one hangs on one small condition, 'pending QA', that would have been lost without the app. Relay is a made-up brand created for this personal project.”