Inside Microsoft's Toronto Office: Documenting Insight's AI Practice
Updated: Sep 5
CocoFilms Studio has worked with Insight for eight years. In January 2026, they brought us to Toronto for the launch of their Data & AI practice, hosted at Microsoft's Canadian headquarters.
We delivered three things from that single day: event photography, the launch film below, and a longer documentary-style piece. On-camera interviews, full event coverage, and a room we had to work around rather than take over. Here's how that works, and what we did and didn't take away with us.
CocoFilms Studio·Toronto, Ontario·January 2026
Insight MicrosoftData & AITorontoEvent PhotographyCorporate Video
Three deliverables, one day
Photography, a launch film, and a long-form piece are three different jobs that happen to occupy the same room. Trying to shoot them as one job is how you end up with three mediocre deliverables.
Photography is reactive. You're moving constantly, watching for the frame that won't happen twice, staying out of sightlines. The launch film is the opposite discipline. Two minutes has to carry an entire practice, so you're thinking about structure while you shoot and deciding in real time what earns its place. The long-form piece needs coverage the other two don't: room tone, wide establishing shots, enough variety in angle and framing that the edit has somewhere to go.
Then there are the interviews, which are their own thing entirely. Executives at a launch have a schedule, and the window you get with them is short and non-negotiable. That means the interview setup has to be ready and tested before anyone sits down, and it has to be somewhere the room's own noise won't ruin the take. You get one pass. Nobody is coming back after lunch.
The way to manage all three is to decide in advance which one owns which part of the day. Keynote block belongs to the film. Breaks and transitions belong to photography. Setup and quiet moments belong to the long-form. Interviews get their own protected slot. You still stay open to whatever actually happens, but you're not improvising the whole schedule at 9 a.m. with a room already filling up.
Working inside a space you don't control
Corporate headquarters come with rules. There are areas you can't shoot, sightlines you can't block, and a building staff whose day you're not going to disrupt. That shapes the approach more than any creative decision does.
Microsoft's Toronto office made a lot of it easy. Floor-to-ceiling windows on an overcast January day produce large, soft, directional light — the kind you'd spend an hour building with a scrim and a bounce. We built the interview setups around those windows rather than fighting them, which meant we could get people in and out quickly without dragging fixtures into a room full of working professionals. The city behind the subject did the rest of the work.
The rest is small discipline. Fast primes so you're not lighting. A quiet body so you're not the loudest thing in the room during a talk. Knowing where you're standing before the session starts, not after.
Montreal-based, working across Canada
CocoFilms Studio is a Montreal video production company. We shoot corporate events, brand films, and documentaries across Canada, and travel is a routine part of how we work — this Insight relationship alone has taken us to Calgary, Toronto, and other cities, on projects involving Microsoft, WestJet, and Apple.
For clients outside Montreal, the practical question is usually whether bringing in an out-of-province crew creates more coordination than it saves. It doesn't, when the crew is small and self-sufficient. We travel light, handle our own logistics, and arrive knowing the schedule. What you're hiring is a team that has done this in unfamiliar buildings many times over.
Project details
Client: Insight
Location: Microsoft Canadian headquarters, Toronto, Ontario
Date: January 2026 Event: Launch of Insight's Data & AI practice
Services: Corporate event photography, brand launch film, on-camera executive interviews, long-form documentary video
Duration: Single-day shoot, full-day event coverage
Production company: CocoFilms Studio, Montreal
Relationship: Eight years, ongoing
Planning a corporate event you need documented properly?
If you're producing an event and you need photography, a promo, and a long-form piece out of it — without three separate crews in the room — that's the work we do. We're based in Montreal and shoot across Canada.
Get in touch or see more of our corporate video work and event videography.
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