Video storytelling |

Weaving Art and Function at Heide Martin Studio

As part of my ongoing Creating Spaces series featuring Maine artists in their working environments, I had the opportunity to work last fall with Heide Martin and her husband, co-founder Patrick Coughlin. The couple operate Rockland, Maine-based Heide Martin Design Studio, creating unique and functional furniture and housewares.

I was drawn to the studio because of the strong sense of style that permeates their work. Working with natural, simple materials available here in Maine, the two produce exquisite pieces of art that happens to double as functional furniture.

In particular, I love how Heide incorporates the art of weaving into many of her pieces, drawing for inspiration from an out-of-print book on traditional weaving patterns, among other sources.

I’m happy to be able to show the video we produced that day, along with a few stills from my visit with Heide and Patrick in their spacious and well-ordered studio.

*Heide Martin and Patrick Coughlin at the Martin Design Studio. © Brian Fitzgerald*

What’s Your Problem?

Clients hire me for all sorts of reasons—often to create content for an ongoing campaign or to make their websites look more appealing. These situations involve parameters that are already set, and my task is to execute consistently with an established look or direction. It’s a valuable service and a useful skill for any visual professional. I’m grateful for that part of my business.

However, when clients ask me to help create a new campaign, a new style, or tell a story about their brand, it’s an entirely different level of creation, involvement, and trust.

Initiating any new visual project involves an exercise that cuts to the heart of things—to establish the story that most needs telling. Once that is done, actually telling the story becomes straightforward. Without this crucial step, it’s impossible to create anything cohesive or interesting.

This is particularly true with video. No one wants to watch a 10-minute video listing a company’s services or products. However, they may watch a video that impacts them, relates to them, or shows them something new. I ask questions like, ‘What is the number one problem you’d like to solve?’ For non-profits, it might be needing more donations. For some companies, it might be brand awareness. For others, it’s to highlight something that truly makes them unique.

I always seize the opportunity to be involved in the process of telling a story and crafting an approach that gets to the heart of what is important. There are plenty of tactical problems to solve when it comes to telling a story. The most important thing is to ask the right questions at the outset to clarify the expected results.

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