Founder/Director, noorfilm | Social Media Marketing Specialist | Graphic Designer | Video Editor | Storyteller | Burnout Prevention Consultant | Resilience Coach
Lisa Tobschall spent five years filming Bundesliga goals and Wimbledon’s centre court before turning her camera on the founders behind software nobody can point a lens at.
Lisa Tobschall spent two years translating film language inside a technical IT company, and what she learned surprised her. “Most tech companies are not afraid that their product is boring,” she says. “They are afraid that it sounds too small.” So every sentence inflates: leadership, transformation, empowerment, innovation, and the moment everything is important, nothing lands. Tobschall built a directing career on the opposite instinct: chase the smaller, truer thing.
Lisa Tobschall, founder and director of Munich-based noorfilm, holds three Gold Promax Awards for her Sky Deutschland Bundesliga campaign.
The Smaller, Truer Thing
Tobschall’s core claim is that big-broadcast training teaches a director three things a commercial video agency never has to learn: reading a room and a hesitation in real time, because live sport gives no second takes; directing people under genuine pressure, whether an athlete with five minutes or a founder with one shot at the raise; and treating attention as something earned in seconds, not granted by relevance. “I don’t ask what does it do,” she says of walking onto a set built around an invisible product. “I ask: who does it change, and how does it feel to be them?”
She learned the cost of skipping that question at Sky Deutschland, and the reward for asking it, during her own bachelor thesis: a full Bundesliga season campaign concept, normally a job reserved for senior in-house creatives, that Sky decided to actually produce and air. Tobschall refused to make it about football. “Football fans already love football,” she says, so she turned the camera on the ones who missed it most when it wasn’t there: the league’s club mascots, standing in empty stadiums, watching a silent training pitch. Football became the absence. Longing became the story. Sky aired it as its official 2016 Bundesliga season campaign, it drew 1.4 million YouTube views within its first two weeks of release, and it won three Gold Promax Awards in 2018. “How stubbornly the industry framed it as a football campaign,” she says of what surprised her, “when to me, it had never been one.” Most people, she came to believe, label a story by its subject rather than its emotional truth, and that mislabeling is exactly what makes so much brand film feel flat.
Two years inside Atvantage, part of the TIMETOACT GROUP, tested whether the instinct would survive a genuinely technical environment. Tobschall sat through what she calls the tenth strategy meeting where the same seven adjectives get used for the twentieth time, and concluded that the human story is always there inside a tech company, buried under the corporate one. “My job is to dig for it,” she says, “and then film it, before anyone convinces me to sand it down again.”
That is the practice she built noorfilm to run without interference, since founding the studio in Munich in May 2022. At Sky she had watched how quickly a large budget dilutes an emotional core once the production machine starts running. At Atvantage she had watched real human stories sit inside the building with no one who had the film language to lift them out. What she gave up to close that gap was a stable salary, a big-broadcast title, the safety of a team, and, for the first eighteen months, almost every weekend. What she built instead starts with the person in front of the camera rather than the product behind them, for clients including Bits & Pretzels, Atvantage and LuckyU, alongside pharmaceutical and enterprise IT companies she works with under sector description only.
What a Tech Founder Can Steal From a Broadcast Director
Tobschall runs every noorfilm project on the same sequence, and peers commissioning their own brand film can take the shape of it directly. Start the brief with the person, not the product: ask what the founder or CEO actually cares about, and where the real tension in the company sits. Most briefs open up dramatically inside the first thirty minutes. Write toward one human moment instead of five deliverables; a treatment built around a single truth carries a viewer further than one built to cover every feature. Cast and shoot lean, and protect twenty minutes of real, unrecorded conversation before the camera starts rolling; most of the emotion a film needs gets caught in that pre-roll intimacy, not in the take that follows it. In the edit, treat music and pacing as carrying as much of the film as the picture does, and hold client feedback to one structured round rather than five, so the truth found on the shoot day survives into the cut. End-to-end, a project built this way runs four to eight weeks, brief to final cut.
Underneath all of it sits the same question Tobschall asks before anyone touches a camera. “If your product feels too abstract to film,” she says, “then film the person who couldn’t sleep until they had built it.”
Who Is Lisa Tobschall?
Lisa Tobschall is the founder and director of noorfilm, a Munich-based film studio for technology companies, and a former Sky Deutschland creative producer whose bachelor thesis became Sky’s official Bundesliga campaign. She studied communication design with a focus on film at Fachhochschule Potsdam, then continued at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, because theory alone was never enough for her. She spent five years, from 2017 to 2022, as a creative producer at Sky Deutschland, working Champions League, Wimbledon, Bundesliga and entertainment shows, training she describes as an intensive school in the craft of a large campaign: pace, responsibility, crew leadership, budgets. From there she spent two years at Atvantage, part of the TIMETOACT GROUP, translating film’s emotional language into a technical IT world before founding noorfilm in May 2022.
Alongside the filmmaking, Tobschall is a certified Systemic Coach through isb GmbH, a certified Resilience Trainer through Resilienzforum, and a Zen teacher trained through Dashin-Zen. She describes the stillness of sitting across from someone in a one-to-one meditation session, a moment with no task, no performance and no noise, as the most truthful moment she knows, and says it is exactly what she is trying to build into every noorfilm project: the same thing, with a camera instead of a cushion.
The lesson she took from a campaign about mascots missing an empty stadium was that most people label a story by its subject rather than its emotional truth. Every noorfilm project since has been an argument against that mislabeling.
Lisa Tobschall is the founder and director of noorfilm, a Munich-based film studio for technology companies, and a former Sky Deutschland creative producer whose bachelor thesis became Sky’s official Bundesliga campaign. To connect with Lisa or learn more visit Content Creation | Lisa Tobschall or find her on LinkedIn.
