The Organization

TimePayment Corp provides equipment lease financing programs to small and mid-sized businesses — enabling vendors to offer their customers low monthly payment options at the point of sale, online and in-store. Their products — EasyApply, SmartApply, and a shopping cart plugin — address a real gap in B2B commerce: the absence of flexible financing options in the online purchasing experience. The technology works. The challenge was communicating it in a way that vendors and their customers would actually engage with.

The Communication Problem

Equipment lease financing is not an inherently exciting category. The product is genuinely valuable to small businesses — preserving cash, enabling purchases they couldn't otherwise make, turning a high-ticket sticker price into an affordable monthly payment. But the language of fintech — credit decisions, documentation, basis points, approval workflows — is the language of friction, not of possibility.

TimePayment needed their vendors and end-users to feel the benefit before they engaged with the mechanics. That required communication that led with the human situation — the unexpected equipment failure, the customer who can't afford the upfront cost, the business owner who needs to buy now and couldn't — and only then introduced the product as the solution.

The Thinking

The work with TimePayment began in 2014 with a series of product explainer videos — scripted, narrated, technically precise. These did the job of explaining how the shopping cart plugin, EasyApply, and the vendor financing programs worked. They were accurate, clear, and clinical.

By 2016, the brief had evolved. TimePayment didn't need more explanation. They needed more attention. The question SVG brought to the 2016 project was a different one: what format makes someone actually want to watch a video about lease financing?

The answer was comedy with stakes. Six short films — two series of three — built around a single structural insight: the worst moment to need financing is the moment you haven't planned for it. The "Double Disaster" series dramatized equipment failures cascading into chaos. The "Magic Showroom" series turned the "as low as" monthly payment into a series of absurdist visual metaphors — a limbo bar, a time traveler, a lion tamed by a food dish.

Each concept was engineered to be immediately legible to a small business owner who has lived through equipment failure or sticker shock — and to make the product solution feel like relief rather than paperwork. The humor was a delivery mechanism for a real message, not decoration.

The two series were structured to work individually and as a set. "Double Disaster" addressed EasyApply — financing for the unexpected. "Magic Showroom" addressed SmartApply — displaying low monthly payments to drive purchase decisions. Different products, different audiences, different emotional registers, unified visual identity.

Production efficiency was designed into the creative from the start. Recurring set pieces and overlapping cast between episodes meant multiple films could be shot back-to-back without full resets — reducing cost without reducing quality.

The Work

A six-part commercial series shot over three days at a premier Boston sound stage — one prep day and two shoot days — with a 30-person professional crew, a full cast across six distinct scenarios, practical in-camera effects including sparks, fire, fog, and lighting design, and two live cats. Scripted, storyboarded, cast, and produced entirely by SVG from concept through final delivery. Delivered as a flexible asset library for use across social, web, and sales enablement channels.

The earlier 2014 product demo series — two scripted narrated explainers, one live action and one animated, for the shopping cart plugin and vendor financing programs — laid the foundation that the 2016 commercial series built on.