Breaking "it looks cheap" into items we could actually fix

When a good product still is not getting through to people, the cause is sometimes not the product but the way it is shown. The thing itself is good, and then it looks cheap on a screen. Worse, you cannot put into words what is wrong with it. Most of the time it gets filed away as a lack of taste on your own part. We did exactly that. I looked at a car we had built for one of our sample films and thought: this looks cheap. That was all I had. I did not know a single thing I should fix.

First, what this is about. The 15-second films on the KAZENA Motion page are mostly not video files; they are drawn inside the browser with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. One of them is a new-model announcement for VOLTA, a fictional EV brand. Because the brand is fictional, the car has to be drawn by us too. In the first version the car was only a shape: an outline, a grey panel where the windows should be, and 2 black circles for tyres. From a distance it read as a car, but the longer you looked, the less it settled.

So I took the impression — cheap — and broke it into items. Not like or dislike, but naming, one by one, what was absent. Do that and an impression turns into a list.

Five things came out. The paint had no reflection of anything around it. The glass did not read as glass, only as another grey surface. There were no seams at the doors or the bonnet, so the body looked like 1 sheet with holes cut in it. The wheels were black circles with no depth. And there was no shadow under the body, so the car was not resting on the ground. None of it was about taste.

We fixed it in that order, from the top of the list. The car was redrawn in SVG: a reflection running from top to bottom across the paint, glass given a brightness of its own, seam lines added at the doors and the bonnet. The wheels became 10-spoke, with a brake caliper visible behind them. The contact shadow was made darkest directly under the body and lighter towards the outside. With each item, a little of the cheapness went away.

Along the way we found a simpler mistake. The car was facing the wrong way. Turning it to face left settled the frame on its own. Having spent all my attention on small things, I had not noticed the largest error until the end. The same round of checking turned up another one: the top of the car was being cut off at the top of the screen.

There was an easier road: use a photograph of a real car. We could not take it. Car photographs almost always carry a maker's emblem, or the shape of a model anyone can name. Put that inside a film for a fictional brand and the viewer receives it as a film about that real company. As a sample, that is not honest. So we drew.

To be straight about it, the car we drew is not on the page any more. We later replaced it with close-up photographs in which neither the logo nor the model can be made out: a headlight, a tyre, light trails at night. The drawn car stayed a well-made drawing, stopping just short of the real thing. I do not think the redrawing was wasted time. What we kept was not the car; it was that list.

The list works on more than cars. When a product photograph looks cheap, there are usually 3 things to look at first. Is there a shadow (without one, the object floats). Is the light coming from the same direction in all of them (if not, a row of photos looks like products from different shops). Is there household clutter in the background (it gets the eye before the product does). None of this is about new equipment or expensive tools.

There is also a wrong way to fix it: not adding what is missing, but adding what you want to say. Trying to cover cheapness with more text and more effects usually scatters the piece. What we decide on a 15-second film is to narrow it to 1 thing. For the car film, that is the fact that a new model exists, and an impression of speed.

We do not promise that a video will raise your sales. What we can promise goes as far as this: narrowing a product down to its single strongest point, and putting it in a form that comes across in a few seconds without reading. For a company that has no customers yet, I think that is as far as it is honest to go.

If your own product looks cheap on a screen right now, break it into items before you doubt your taste. "Somehow off" cannot be fixed; "there is no shadow" can. That is all we did with the car.

Finally, where we stand. KAZENA Motion does not accept orders, quotes or payments yet. We are in the middle of adding the video-production KBLI — the business licence — to the company, and until it is granted the page is an introduction only. Every amount shown there is a planned price. You can ask the page to notify you when we begin accepting work. On licensing I write only about our own paperwork; I am not a tax accountant or a lawyer, so for your own business registration please confirm with a professional.