Flammenwerk at OLMA 2026 — a New Video from the Fair Every Day

Flammenwerk GmbH is a Swiss company that sells wood-burning fireplace stoves. From 8 to 18 October 2026 it exhibited at OLMA in St. Gallen, a major Swiss fair, with a stand in Hall 3. While the fair was on, a new short video from the stand went out on social media almost every day. Each video carried one message: the fair discount, free delivery, the warranty, the choice of models, a prize draw, a thank-you to a partner or an invitation to visit the stand and the showroom.

How I worked

The client team filmed at the stand on a phone and a small DJI camera, and sent the footage, the fair posters and a voice message with the idea to a shared WhatsApp group. The ideas were theirs, often a little sketch: one person asks, the other answers, and the punchline comes at the end.

From that I first put together a storyboard, a shot-by-shot plan of the video: what gets cut, where the captions go, which effect and which sound. Once the plan was approved, I edited the video in 16:9 and posted it to the group for review. I usually made the client’s changes the same day, so every video was ready to go out the next morning. Over the course of the fair, that added up to ten videos.

What went into the videos

• A clean voice in a noisy hall: speech was isolated from the crowd noise and levelled, and every video got its own new AI-generated music track that dips under the voice.
• Fire as a signature: a wave of fire as the transition and an end card with a live flame in the stove, both made with AI video generation. The cards were built from elements of the fair posters, so the videos look just like the stand.
• Gold animated captions in the Flammenwerk look: a “Qualitätscheck” stamp, check marks, a big “5” and “20 %”, the stand number and the fair dates.
• An animated map of Switzerland: as the free delivery destinations are listed, cities light up one by one with a “ding”, and finally a run of dots sweeps across the whole country.
• All 36 models in a few seconds: photos of every stove were pulled from the Shopify store and cut into a fast montage to a string of dings.
• A stove in a living room: a small photo from the website was redrawn at high resolution with AI, then the flame in the stove was animated so that it really burns.
• Watermark removal: the camera stamped its watermark in the corner of the frame, and in one shot it ran across a face. It was removed with a mask traced from the letters, and when the client sent a clean recording, the video was switched to it. In the other videos the watermark was covered by the stand label.
• Humour: a slow-motion stumble with a cartoon sound and an “UPS!” caption, a “quality check” by jumping on a stove, vacuuming the stand after the rush and confetti for a stove just sold.
• A prize draw: an insert with a jar full of wood pieces and numbers popping up (“100? 250?”) invites visitors to guess.
• Decisions made with the client: subtitles were tried and dropped, captions were removed when the client didn’t want them, and the amount on the payment screen was blurred at first, then left visible at the client’s request.

The videos

The videos are in German, as approved by the client, in the order they were made.

For Flammenwerk I had earlier also designed the logo and built the multilingual Shopify store.