Cloudflare trusts Backblaze for independent cloud storage

Backblaze was producing a series of customer testimonial videos, and Cloudflare was an important client to showcase. An endorsement from Cloudflare carries weight in the infrastructure world that a dozen smaller customers can't match, and getting their CEO on camera was an even bigger win. Backblaze brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in San Francisco, to produce a testimonial featuring Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince.

The Challenge

Cloudflare gave us a three hour window in their San Francisco office. Load in, set up, film, and be out. Matthew had about thirty minutes that he could film. A small window, but doable with the right approach.

That ruled out most of what goes into a typical enterprise customer testimonial. No b-roll of the office or the team, no second location, no room to reset if the first setup wasn't working. Everything in the finished video had to come out of that half hour or be sourced from somewhere else.

Our Approach

We filmed in Cloudflare's lobby, in front of their wall of lava lamps. Anyone who works in infrastructure recognizes it instantly. It put the viewer inside Cloudflare's building and made clear whose endorsement this was, which is work that b-roll would normally have to do.

Matthew spoke direct to camera, matching the format of other customer testimonials we were producing for Backblaze as part of a larger series. We kept the footprint small and the setup fast so he could walk in, deliver, and get back to his day without waiting on us.

Cloudflare gave us permission to pull b-roll from their existing videos on YouTube, and we added a small amount of stock footage and simple motion graphics to support the interview where it needed something visual.

The Outcome

Getting the CEO of a company like Cloudflare to agree to a testimonial is harder than filming one. Their communications team has to approve it, an executive has to give up time they don't have, and the whole thing has to be easy enough that nobody regrets saying yes.

Backblaze walked away with an important customer on camera, delivered by the CEO, filmed in the one location that identifies Cloudflare at a glance. We made the experience simple for Matthew and he left on schedule, which reflected well on Backblaze with a partner they cared about. We built the production around what Cloudflare could give us instead of asking them for more, because sometimes, the person on camera matters more than the production value of the video itself.