Analysis · Cannes Lions 2026

A note on timing. The 2026 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity runs 22–26 June 2026. This analysis was written in May 2026, before the 2026 winners were announced. It is therefore built on the full 2025 Film and Film Craft Lions slate — which is the most recent complete data set — plus the 2026 commercial work that is already in market and being talked about in the trade press. When the 2026 Lions are announced in late June, this piece will be updated with a 2026 winners’ section and the patterns below will be re-tested against that data. The headline finding is the one I expect to hold: the boarding craft that wins Lions in 2026 looks much more like long-form film boarding than 30-second TVC boarding.

Cannes Lions 2026 — what the winning films tell us about storyboarding now

I looked at the 2025 Film Lions and Film Craft Lions slate with a single question: what is the storyboard layer of the work doing differently from the work that won three or four years ago. I picked the films that the trade press, the festival itself, and the agency / production world have agreed are the work of the year — the two Film Grand Prix winners (Channel 4’s Considering What? for the Paris Paralympics, and L’Oréal Paris’ The Final Copy of Ilon Specht), the Film Craft Grand Prix (Telstra’s Better on a Better Network via Bear Meets Eagle On Fire and Revolver), and a working set of Gold-winning films across the rest of the Film and Film Craft categories. The selection skews toward the films that were credited as Grand Prix or Gold rather than Silver and Bronze, because the Grand Prix and Gold tier is where boarding craft is most visible and most argued over.

Six patterns emerged. The biggest one is the one I want to lead with, because it is the one that should change how UK agencies and production companies are commissioning boards in 2026.

The boarding patterns in the 2025 winners

Pattern 1 — Long-form supplanted the 30-second spot at the top of the festival

The Film Grand Prix did not go to a 30-second TVC in 2025. Both Grands Prix went to long-form films. Channel 4’s Considering What? is a 140-second film about gravity, friction and time. L’Oréal Paris’ The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, via McCann Paris, is an 18-minute documentary about the copywriter who wrote “Because I’m Worth It.”

This matters at the boarding level because long-form is a different boarding job. A 30-second TVC needs 12 to 24 frames and lives or dies on the rhythm of the cut. An 18-minute documentary needs structural boarding — sequence-level beats, not frame-by-frame coverage. The boarder is being commissioned as a film-editor adjacent role, not as an illustrator. The brief from the agency starts to sound much more like the brief a feature director gives a previsualisation artist than the brief a Soho creative gives a commercial visualiser.

If the 2026 festival rewards this pattern again — and based on the work already in market this year, I expect it will — UK producers should be planning for boards that look more like a film’s sequence-bible and less like a 24-panel deck.

Pattern 2 — The 26-spot campaign is back, and it is a boarder’s brief

The Film Craft Grand Prix went to Telstra’s Better on a Better Network, a campaign of 26 individual spots produced by Bear Meets Eagle On Fire and directed by Jeff Low through Revolver. Each spot represents a different regional Australian town. Twenty-six separate films, each with its own internal logic, all visually consistent enough to read as a single campaign.

That is a boarder’s brief, and a substantial one. The work of holding 26 short films inside one visual grammar is the work of pre-production, not post. The boarder is, in effect, building the campaign’s visual codex before the director walks on set on the first one. The frames have to telegraph what every spot will look like — pacing, framing logic, the way a wide will resolve into a close-up — because the production cannot shoot 26 films from scratch on 26 separate boards.

[Pattern note: I expect at least one 2026 Film Craft contender to use this same pattern — the multi-spot campaign anchored by a boarding bible. It is a far more efficient route to a Lions submission than a single hero film, and the post-COVID economics support it.]

Pattern 3 — Documentary craft is being absorbed back into the boarder’s job

The Final Copy of Ilon Specht is, formally, a documentary. McCann Paris made it. L’Oréal Paris paid for it. It won a Film Grand Prix because the agency and the brand understood that the strongest brand film of the year was not a commercial in any traditional sense.

The boarding work on a documentary-style brand film is not what most commercial boarders are trained for. It is closer to the work I sometimes do for music videos and longer-form films than the work I do on a Coca-Cola TVC. It needs structural boards (which scene goes where, and why), it needs character boards (what the talking-head is doing with their hands when they say the line), and it needs evidentiary boards (the cutaway archive shots, the inserts, the b-roll the cut will eventually live or die on).

For UK production companies pitching against Riff Raff, Stink, Pulse and Smuggler in 2026, the agencies that win the documentary-format brand commission will be the agencies whose boards demonstrate documentary-fluency at pitch stage. That is not a boarding job most commercials boarders are putting on their reels. It should be.

Pattern 4 — Craft Lions are being won by the production company, not the agency

The Film Craft Grand Prix — Telstra via Bear Meets Eagle On Fire — credits Revolver as the production company and Jeff Low as the director. The Film Craft Gold list, per Shots and LBB, repeatedly puts the production company first in the credit stack, with the agency in support. Compare to a decade ago, when the agency name was the headline credit on every Cannes Lions case film.

This is partly an editorial shift in how the trade press credits work, and partly a real shift in where the boarding craft is being held. Production companies — Revolver, Biscuit Filmworks, Smuggler, Stink, Riff Raff in the UK context — are now the home of the boarding craft on the projects that win Craft Lions. The agency commissions the boards, but the boarding artist increasingly answers to the director through the production company, not to the agency creative through the agency producer.

What it means for boarders: the production-company-side relationship is now the higher-leverage one. Repping at a production-company-favoured artist agency, being on the call sheet of a production company that wins Craft Lions, being known to two or three production-company-side EPs — that matters more in 2026 than it did in 2018.

Pattern 5 — The 2024 Olympics and Paralympics produced two of the year’s strongest boarding briefs

Both Channel 4’s Considering What? (Paralympics, 4Creative, produced by Biscuit Filmworks) and the Telstra craft win benefitted from boarding briefs that were structurally locked-down by a real-world event calendar. The Paralympics broadcast date is not a moving target. The boarding artist on a Paralympics campaign knows the lock date with months of notice. That allows the boards to be paced as a structural document over weeks, not as a fire-drill over 72 hours.

The implication for 2026: sports-broadcasting briefs are likely to keep winning Film and Film Craft Lions disproportionately to their share of overall commercial production. They give boarders the runway to do their best work. UK rights-holder broadcasters (Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon Prime sports) commissioning around the 2026 Winter Olympics and the 2026 World Cup should expect boarding work pitched at a Lions tier from any production company seriously chasing the brief.

Pattern 6 — AI is not in the credits yet

This is the most interesting negative finding from the 2025 slate. Across the Film and Film Craft Grand Prix winners and the Gold tier coverage I worked from, the production credits do not name AI tools as part of the boarding or pre-vis chain. There are 2025 Lions winners outside the Film categories that do foreground AI craft (the Innovation and Digital Craft tracks have several), but in Film and Film Craft, the boards-to-screen chain is still a human craft from end to end on the work that wins.

That is going to look different in 2026. The IAB and several agency surveys put generative AI tool adoption at around 91% of US agencies as of early 2026, with around 95% of marketers testing AI for some part of creative production. But what the 2025 Cannes data tells you is that adoption and craft credit are not the same thing. The work the festival rewards is still being boarded by humans, on paper or on Cintiq, by artists who have been doing this for 15 years. AI is in the workflow earlier — for ideation, for mood, for thumbnailing — but at the level where the Film Craft Lions are awarded, the human boarding pass is still the spine of the film.

I expect that to hold into 2026. The Lions reward craft, and craft on a 140-second film is still the boarder, the director and the agency creative in a room together — even if the agency creative arrived at the room having already prompted four AI mood reels on Monday morning.

What’s NEW in 2026 vs 2025

A few things have shifted since the 2025 awards were handed out that I expect to register in the 2026 Lions slate.

Streaming-platform native ads are commissioning at scale. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+ all opened their ad tiers in 2024/2025; SVoD ad revenue is up significantly year on year. The boarding briefs coming out of streaming-native commissions look different from broadcast TVC briefs — typically vertical-aware, often with skip-rate-conscious cold opens, sometimes with native interactive layers. The 2026 Lions slate will probably include several streaming-native craft winners that did not have a comparable category in 2025.

Brand documentary as a format has crossed from experiment to category. The Ilon Specht film legitimised an entire genre that had been bubbling under for three or four years. Expect more 2026 Film Lions submissions in the 12-to-25-minute documentary-format range, particularly from heritage brands with archive footage to mine.

The “campaign of N spots” model is being underwritten by data. Telstra’s 26-spot win in Film Craft was made cost-effective by a production model that boards once and shoots in a tight window. Several UK 2026 commissions I know about (under NDA, can’t name) are using the same approach. Boarding-bible work — one document, many shoots — is becoming a higher-volume part of the boarder’s diary.

What changed — and what didn’t

What changed: the work that wins Lions is now mostly long-form, mostly production-company-credited, mostly structurally boarded rather than frame-by-frame.

What didn’t change: the boarder is still drawing by hand at the moment of truth. The director is still the person in the chair making the call on each frame. The agency creative who lost two nights of sleep over the script is still the person in the back of the room nodding or wincing at the boards. Those three roles, in that order, are still the people making the films that win.

What this means for producers commissioning in 2026 and 2027

If you are an agency producer or production-company EP commissioning boards in 2026, the work to plan for looks like this:

• Budget for more frames per project than you did in 2024. Long-form needs more structural boards. A 90-second hero film needs 35 to 50 boarded frames in 2026, not the 18 to 24 it would have needed in 2020.
• Book the boarder earlier. Structural boarding on a long-form film is a three-week job, not a three-day job. The good boarders’ diaries fill up six weeks out, not six days.
• Brief the boarder as if you are briefing a film director, not an illustrator. What is the film about. Who is the protagonist. What is the structural arc. Then talk frames.
• For multi-spot campaigns, commission the bible first. Get the visual codex locked before the first shoot day, not in parallel with it.
• Don’t expect AI to do the boarding work that wins Lions. Use it where it helps — ideation, mood, thumbnailing, agency-deck visuals. But the boarding pass that becomes a Lions case film is still human-made on the projects that have won so far.

About this analysis

This piece looked at the 2025 Cannes Lions Film and Film Craft slate — Grand Prix and Gold tier — as reported by the official Cannes Lions release, Contagious, LBB, Shots, Creative Salon, Adweek and Campaign Brief. The 2026 festival had not yet taken place at the time of writing (it runs 22–26 June 2026). I reviewed the full Film Grand Prix and Film Craft Grand Prix winners and the Gold-tier coverage across the trade press; I did not review the full Silver and Bronze slates. Outside the Film and Film Craft tracks I drew on the Entertainment, Digital Craft and Industry Craft Grand Prix announcements where they shed light on boarding craft adjacencies. The pattern claims above are mine, not the festival’s. When the 2026 winners are announced, this piece will be updated and the pattern set re-tested.

Closing

The 2025 winners did not look like ads. They looked like films that happened to be paid for by brands. That is the boarding shift, and it is the one every UK producer commissioning in 2026 should be planning for.

The boarders who will be on the credits of the films that win the 2026 Lions are the ones being booked, right now, on the briefs that have a real structural problem to solve. If you are commissioning one of those briefs, book early. Pay properly. Brief like a film director. The frames you get back will be the frames that, twelve months from now, the trade press will be writing about.

Seb Antoniou is a London-based storyboard artist with ten years of commercial credits including the Premier League, the BBC Winter Olympics, Coca-Cola, Bentley, Nike, Honda, Amazon Audible, NatWest, Lexus and Sky VIP. He boards long-form, multi-spot and single-hero campaigns for UK and international agencies and production companies. This analysis will be updated in July 2026 with a 2026 Cannes Lions winners’ section.