9:16 vertical cited micro-fact drop — data journalism, one true number a day

Field Notes (Concept)

SaaS & techData video9:16

20 sec · 9:16 · captionedmeasured from the file above

The concept behind this SaaS data video

Vertical 9:16 data video for the feed — Field Notes is a single sourced number, set like a piece of data journalism. It is the format for a brand that wants to show up daily without a daily shoot — one honest figure, typeset with intent, scored to a few seconds of motion, native to 9:16. The discipline is in the restraint: one fact, cited, legible at arm's length on a phone, never a wall of stats.

It proves we treat vertical as a first-class canvas rather than a crop, and that the data specialty scales down to a single striking number as cleanly as it scales up to a narrated report-film. A self-initiated concept piece — studio spec work, illustrative facts only.

A vertical data video where four words in the source line decide the meaning

The figure this film exists to deliver is a cost per megawatt-hour, and a cost per megawatt-hour is meaningless without knowing which cost. So the source line under the chart does not merely credit the study — it carries the version number, the year, and the four qualifiers that fix the meaning: levelized, mean, unsubsidized, nominal. Any of those four flipped would change the answer, which is exactly why they are on screen rather than in a footnote nobody will ever see. It is also the cheapest insurance a brand can buy against being quoted back at itself.

Down the left margin, set vertically in small caps, the film carries its own series name and its concept label. That is a magazine device and it is here for a practical reason: vertical video gets screenshotted and re-cropped constantly, and a label set into the margin rather than into a corner survives the horizontal crops that take a corner badge first.

One fact per film, and the restraint is the format. There is a single number, a single line to show how it got there, its source, and a shade under twenty seconds of runtime — legible at arm’s length on a phone and finished before a thumb moves. It is the smallest unit the data-driven video specialty comes in, and it demands the same discipline as the long-form pieces: nothing on screen that is not in the data.

Read the narration in full — 2 passages, verbatim

Taken from the caption track this player loads — not a summary of it, so anything the film claims can be checked against the frame that carries it.

Quick one. In two thousand nine, solar power cost three hundred fifty-nine dollars a megawatt-hour. A decade later, forty dollars.
Eighty-nine percent cheaper. Source, Lazard's energy cost study. Follow for one true number a day.

Blue Snow Developers makes the saas & tech work here the way it makes everything — by hand, from real material, in one engine. Browse every saas & tech piece in the portfolio, see how the studio makes data videos, or what the studio makes and how a project runs, or read the studio's own identity system — the design tokens, type scale and motion rules behind Field Notes (Concept) and everything else here. When the brief is clear, talk to us about a data video.

Field Notes (Concept) is filed under saas & tech. Read next: why we cut real-estate video by hand instead of generating it, the rest of the studio's field notes, and a film studio run by an engineer.