Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid "Transform Your Perspective" Storyboards — Seb Antoniou

Storyboards by Seb Antoniou for the 2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid “Transform Your Perspective” launch film, produced in London.

The brief

Bentley were launching the Flying Spur Hybrid — the first plug-in hybrid in the Flying Spur range — and wanted a 90-second film that did more than show the car. The narrative hook the director landed on was a designer struggling with a creative block, his young daughter, and a drive that breaks him out of it. The journey through the city becomes the moment his next building takes shape. The architecture grows out of the road. The Flying Spur is the vehicle for the metaphor as much as the literal vehicle in frame. Seb had worked with the director before, which meant the briefing was short and the early boards could go in loose.

The storytelling decision

The heart of the story is not the car. It is the designer struggling with a creative block and his relationship with his daughter. We boarded the father-daughter beats first, then dropped the beauty shots of the Flying Spur in around them — which is the opposite of how a car film usually gets cut, and the only reason the 90-second version holds together.

A car film at 90 seconds usually leans on hero shots: profile, three-quarter, interior, badge, exterior tracking. This one needed the human story load-bearing, with the car as the spine the human story is hung off. Seb’s pass put the emotional beats — daughter knocking on the studio door, the look between them in the car, the building taking shape in the designer’s eye — at the locked points of the cut, and let the beauty shots breathe in the gaps.

Credits

• Brand: Bentley
• Vehicle: Flying Spur Hybrid (the brand’s first plug-in hybrid model)
• Year: 2022
• Format: 90s hero film with 60s, 30s and 15s cutdowns for dealer / digital
• Region: Global launch (UK lead, English-language master)
• Seb’s role: Storyboard artist, full sequence, plus reference sketches for the CGI architecture team

Process notes

• Deliverables:
  • Black-and-white storyboard frames (PSD + JPEG) for the full 90s sequence
  • Loose architectural reference sketches handed to the CGI vendor as the basis for the “growing buildings” sequence at the end of the film
  • One round of amends included; further passes booked as additional days

Board frames

Selected frames from the boarded sequence:

• frame-01.jpg — designer at desk, creative block, daughter enters
• frame-02.jpg — father-daughter exchange, studio interior
• frame-03.jpg — keys lifted, garage walk
• frame-04.jpg — Flying Spur exterior reveal, three-quarter front
• frame-05.jpg — interior, daughter in passenger seat
• frame-06.jpg — road into city, dawn light
• frame-07.jpg — designer’s POV through windscreen, ideas surfacing
• frame-08.jpg — architectural reference sketch, building growing from skyline
• frame-09.jpg — final beauty shot, Flying Spur and finished building in frame
• frame-10.jpg — closing two-shot, father and daughter

Final film

Final cut on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXWPt26hiHI