Glassboards.

A glassboard video puts your expert in front of a sheet of lit glass and lets them draw the idea out by hand while looking straight down the lens. The diagram appears between you and the viewer, the presenter never turns their back, and a knotty concept that would take three slides to land suddenly makes sense in ninety seconds. If you have a product that needs explaining, a process people keep getting wrong, or a training point that never sticks in a deck, this is the format that fixes it.

What a glassboard video actually is

It is sometimes called a lightboard. A presenter stands behind a large pane of glass that is lit along its edges, so anything written on it glows. They write and sketch towards the camera, and we flip the image in the edit so the text reads the right way round for your audience. The result is a person and their thinking on screen at the same time, with eye contact held throughout. Nobody is reading from a teleprompter behind the camera while a deck plays separately. The explanation and the human delivering it are one shot.

It works because faces and motion hold attention in a way a static slide never will. The viewer watches a real person reason through a problem, and the writing appears in step with the words. That pairing is what makes the point land and stay landed.

How we deliver it at the Southbank studio

We shoot glassboard videos at our studio on the Southbank in London, on the same floor we use for broadcast and live streaming. The glass rig, the edge lighting, the camera and the colour are all set up and tested before you arrive, so you are not paying for us to build a set on the day. You turn up with your content and your presenter, and we run the shoot like a TV segment rather than a hobby project.

Before the shoot we run a short pre-production call to agree the script, the key diagrams and the order of the points. On the day, our crew handles the lighting, the framing, the audio and the writing technique, which has a few tricks to it, such as pen choice, pace and where to stand so you never block your own diagram. A presenter who has never done this before will be fine, because we coach them through it shot by shot. After filming we flip and grade the footage, cut it to length, add lower thirds or captions if you want them, and hand back files ready for your site, your LMS or social.

What you get

• A pre-production call to shape the script and the diagrams before anyone is on camera
• A studio day on the Southbank with the glassboard rig, lighting, camera and crew ready to roll
• On-camera coaching for your presenter, so a first-timer still looks at ease
• Clean audio recorded properly, not picked up off a laptop mic
• Edited, colour-graded videos with the writing flipped to read correctly
• Optional captions, lower thirds and your branding burned in
• Final files in the formats you need for web, training platforms and social

Where it earns its place

Glassboard works best when the thing you are explaining has moving parts. Product walkthroughs where features connect to each other. Onboarding and training where a process has steps people skip. Technical or scientific concepts that need a diagram drawn live rather than a finished graphic dropped in. Thought-leadership pieces where you want a named expert to be the face of the idea, not a faceless voiceover. Sales enablement, where one strong explainer saves your team repeating the same fifteen minutes on every call.

It is also a content engine. Book a single studio day and a prepared presenter can record a run of explainers back to back, so you walk away with a quarter of teaching content from one session rather than one video from one shoot.

Why it beats a slide deck or an animation

The obvious alternative is a screen recording over slides, or an animated explainer. A slide recording is cheap, and it shows. There is no face, no eye contact and no sense of a person who actually knows the subject, so it gets half-watched and forgotten. An animation looks polished but it is slow and expensive to produce, every change costs another revision round, and the moment your product updates the video is out of date and awkward to fix.

A glassboard video keeps the expert and the human connection that a slide recording throws away, without the cost and the rigidity of full animation. If the content changes, you reshoot a short segment in the studio rather than commissioning a new animation from scratch. You are paying for a clear explanation that people finish watching, instead of a polished file nobody gets to the end of.

Common questions

Does my presenter need to be good on camera?

No. Most people who stand behind the glass have never done it before, and that is normal. We coach them through each shot, keep the takes short, and there is no shame in going again. The writing happens at a calm pace, so nobody has to be a natural performer. By the second or third take they have the rhythm.

Do I have to write neatly, and does the text come out backwards?

Ordinary handwriting is fine, and the camera is forgiving. The presenter writes facing the camera, which feels mirror-image to them, but we flip the footage in the edit so the audience reads everything the correct way round. We also guide what goes on the glass beforehand, so you are not improvising a complicated diagram live.

How long does a shoot take, and how many videos can we make?

A focused session can produce several short explainers in a single studio day, provided the scripts are ready going in. That is the most cost-effective way to use the format. A single one-off video is quicker again. We will give you a realistic number once we have seen your scripts on the pre-production call, rather than promising a figure blind.

Can you add our branding, captions and graphics?

Yes. We can add lower thirds, your logo, on-screen captions and a branded top and tail in the edit. If you want supporting graphics cut in alongside the glassboard footage, we can do that too. Tell us where the videos are going and we will deliver them in the right shape for that platform.

If this sounds like the format for your explainer, the easiest first step is a look at how it works. Come in for a walkthrough of the Southbank studio and the glassboard rig, or just have a conversation with us about the points you are trying to get across. No script required to start the chat, and no commitment beyond seeing whether it fits.