We make documentary film, photography and writing for museums, galleries, festivals and universities — work that treats an audience as intelligent and a subject as worth understanding.
There is a particular kind of film the cultural sector keeps commissioning. It runs to ninety seconds. It opens on a drone shot of the building. Somebody says the word "journey". A curator is filmed mid-sentence with their name spelled wrong on the lower third, and the whole thing is scored with library piano that suggests, gently, that you should feel something.
It is not a bad film exactly. It is simply a film that could be about any institution in Britain, which is another way of saying it is about none of them. It gets four hundred views, three of which are the director of communications checking it uploaded correctly.
We think this happens for an understandable reason. Cultural organisations are asked to justify themselves constantly — to funders, to boards, to local authorities, to a press that treats the arts as either elite or endangered. Under that pressure, the safest thing to produce is something that sounds like everyone else, because everyone else has evidently survived producing it.
But the institutions themselves are not generic at all. A regional museum holds forty thousand objects and one of them has a story that would genuinely stop a stranger in the street. A university archive has a conservator who has spent eleven years on a single manuscript and can explain why in a way that makes you want to see it. A festival has a lighting technician who knows exactly which two minutes of the year are worth filming.
Our practice is built on the belief that the specific thing is always more interesting than the general one, and that audiences can tell the difference immediately. We spend the first part of any commission looking for that specific thing, and we will happily tell a client that the story they wanted to tell is the third most interesting one available.
The rest is craft, and craft is not the difficult part. Filming carefully in a gallery, lighting an object without cooking it, writing a thousand words that a curator will not quietly rewrite — these are solvable problems. Finding the thing actually worth filming is the work.
"The specific thing is always more interesting than the general one."
Studio position, revised 2024Everything is made in-house by a studio of eleven. We do not sub-contract the thinking, and the person who researches a project is on set when it is filmed.
Short-form documentary about objects, people, processes and places. Researched properly, filmed patiently and cut without a voiceover telling the viewer how to feel.
Installation views, object photography, event documentation and portraiture, made to archive standard as well as press standard, because most of it will outlive the campaign it was shot for.
Writing that sits between the academic and the promotional: exhibition texts, interviews, essays and the interpretive copy that has to work for a specialist and a fourteen-year-old simultaneously.
Recorded testimony captured to archival standard, transcribed, catalogued and delivered in a format your archive will still be able to open in twenty years.
Content designed against a specific audience question, then measured honestly afterwards — including when the answer is that it did not work.
Online exhibitions, digital catalogues and long-form web features, built to be readable, accessible and still working in five years without a maintenance contract.
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A regional museum wanted a film about its whole collection. We made one about a single unremarkable spoon, and what its provenance revealed about the town.
Four years of documenting a Scottish arts festival, shot almost entirely at load-in and get-out rather than during performances.
A conservator's decade-long work on a single manuscript, filmed over eighteen months at intervals, with no narration at all.
The constraints are conservation, insurance and access. We work to your registrar's requirements, film out of hours where objects demand it, and deliver archive-grade files alongside the campaign versions. Roughly half our commissions come from this sector.
Live work cannot be repeated for the camera. We plan around get-in and get-out, agree performer consent in advance, and staff to cover simultaneous stages rather than promising one crew can be everywhere.
Researchers are rightly wary of being simplified. Our editorial process includes a factual review stage where the subject can correct substance without redesigning the film, which is why academics agree to appear a second time.
Heritage material has a longer life than a marketing cycle. Everything is delivered with catalogued metadata, documented rights and file formats chosen for longevity rather than convenience.
Excluding VAT. We quote a fixed fee against a written brief and we do not bill by the hour. Reduced rates apply to organisations with a turnover below £500,000 — ask, it is not a negotiation.
£3,400 from
£11,000 from
£34,000 per year
Not the format, not the running time — the thing you want an audience to understand. We reply within two working days, and if we are not the right studio we will say so and suggest who is.
Email[email protected]
Telephone+44 20 7946 0688
StudioSecond Floor, 14 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3JA, United Kingdom
HoursMonday to Friday, 09:30–18:00 GMT