This film opened Anthropic's first B2B enterprise sales conference, marking the first time Claude had a brand presence in a business context. The audience included finance industry executives, meaning the tone needed to read as rooted, steady, and intentional.

The central challenge was to avoid generic tech-disruption hype and the sense of menace this audience was already primed to expect from AI. The first direction we moved forward with used finance-specific imagery of graphs and currency iconography with Claude as an active protagonist moving through a landscape of increasing complexity. Stakeholder feedback was clear: the imagery exposed our surface-level understanding of the financial world, and the active protagonist leaned into exactly the kind of AI presence this audience distrusted.

Rather than patch that direction, I zoomed out into a deeper research process, learning how Claude specifically integrates into different sectors of the financial industry. That research reframed the whole premise: the industry isn't chaotic, it's overloaded. Claude's offering is synthesis and translation, freeing finance professionals to work more effectively rather than replacing them. That insight drove a full recast of Claude's role from active protagonist to something far more restrained. No face, no character, just the brand color moving through the system, allowing Claude's arrival to read as release rather than rescue.

As design director, I owned the visual language end to end — art directing and designing style frames, defining narrative structure and themes alongside my creative director, and directing animation. I led the research process, met with stakeholders, and workshopped with the Anthropic team during moments of creative crisis.

We worked with Anthropic for a second enterprise film just a few weeks later. In dialogue with the science film that followed, the two projects began to sketch the outline of a framework for how Claude's character should flex by audience across B2B contexts.