What to put on a lobby video wall.

Water, weather, trees, sunlight moving across a surface. This is the default for a reason: it is calm, it suits most lobbies, and nobody has to look at it for it to work. A tall wall takes tall things especially well — rain on glass, a waterfall, a forest seen from the floor up.

Shape and movement in the building's own colors. It carries a brand without putting a logo on the wall, and it sits comfortably in a modern lobby where a photographic scene can look like a screensaver.

Tenant logos, a welcome for a firm moving in, an anniversary, a floor that has just been finished. Everything here needs the tenant's sign-off before it goes up.

The change people notice. Put it up the week before, not the morning of, and take it down before it goes stale. A building that marks the season on its wall reads as a building somebody is looking after.

Sparingly. A lobby wall is not a notice board, and a wall that is mostly notices stops being looked at — which costs you the one time you need it read. Keep it to the few things everyone in the building has to know.

For the one thing a year that has to be exactly right: the building's story, a founding tenant, a rebrand. Hire an agency and shoot it. That is what agencies are for, and no subscription replaces it.

One tall thing reads well: a tree, a figure, falling water, a column of light. A wide scene loses its sides, and everything that made it work goes with them.

A lobby wall is read from across the room and from the door, not from arm's length. Detail that only works close up is wasted, and slow movement carries further than fast cutting.

Short and large, or not at all. A line of text on a wall that tall is a sign, and a sign that cannot be read from the entrance is not doing anything.

Licence clips by the clip or by subscription, and start the same afternoon. Much of it is wide; portrait clips are fewer and still not made for your wall, so a tall wall usually gets something cropped or stretched. It is not about your building, and somebody still has to choose the clips and put them up, every time.

A film made for you, to your standards, by people whose job it is. It costs what a film costs, and each new film means a quote and a schedule. Right for the one big film; hard to justify for content that has to change with the season.

Somebody else's taste, changed for you on a schedule. Good-looking and almost no effort. You choose from their collection; nothing in it is made for your building, your tenants or your season.

Type instructions into a generator and it gives you a clip at a time, which you then assemble. It is the most flexible option and the most work: you learn the tool's habits, pay per attempt, and join the clips into something long enough to play in a lobby. Getting your own logo to look the same in every clip is the part that takes the most practice.

Made for this job: the wall's ongoing content, in your building's proportions, changed by you. You say what you want in plain words — there is no prompt to learn — watch the whole video in a browser, change any scene you do not like, add your logos, and put it on the wall yourself. Nothing goes on the wall unless you put it there.

It plays on the wall through the player your integrator already has, or through a small player on the box in your rack. The browser link is for looking at a video and signing it off, not for running the wall. How it connects →

What it costs: from $150 a month for 1 screen, with 100 credits of new video included every month; more credits are $1 each from $50. Free to try. Implicit Media owns the video. You are licensed to show it on your screens for as long as you have a plan.