In almost every offline cut Sandwich sends over, there's a box. A temp screenshot, an empty frame, a slate that says "UI goes here." They always carved out the space; filling it was the job. And in a lot of these spots the interface isn't a prop in the background, it's a character, sometimes the star of the whole commercial. This is ten years of what's happened inside that box.
Sandwich is the Los Angeles studio that helped define what a modern tech commercial looks like. And when the product being advertised is software, the interface is the product, so the screen is rarely set dressing. It demos the feature, it answers the voiceover, it lands the joke on cue. It has to read in a couple of seconds, stay true to the real product, and look just slightly better than life while doing it.
My seat, from Toronto, for a decade now: the cut arrives, and the screens go back. I design and animate the interface work, built to the edit, timed to the read, faithful to what the product actually does; Sandwich's finishing side comps it onto the devices in the footage. It's a quiet kind of craft. When it's done right, nobody watching believes anyone did anything. The phone simply behaves.
It's also one of my longest-running collaborations, and the clearest proof of how this business actually works. The box is a standing question: can we hand this over and not think about it again? Ten years of offline cuts later, the answer has held. That's not a portfolio credit. That's the whole model.
The box keeps arriving. I keep filling it.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.