Exploring the rapid development of esports in the UK and globally, and the growth of the esports educational sector, this piece was shot on location in London, at the Tencent offices and the PUBG Mobile Global Championship at Excel.
Featured on Tencent’s website, it illuminates their recent report on this fast-moving sector, succinctly setting out their ambitions and the current state of play, with contributions from industry experts and a rising esports star.
Covering this celebratory one-day corporate event on a country estate was an exciting and rewarding logistical challenge. With 1500 guests taking part in more than 40 scheduled activities around the sprawling site, and multiple different outputs requiring extensive coverage, there were a lot of moving parts.
Meticulous planning paid off, with our 3 camera units, plus drone operators, working tirelessly from 7am to 11:30pm to capture the full range of the day’s experiences, in slow-motion action shots and candid interviews.
Immediately after the event, our editors sprang into action to craft the highlights film seen here, as well as distilling key messages from the day’s topline speeches and presentations into punchy short-form videos, delivered swiftly for maximum impact.
The comms team at Novartis had an idea that they wanted to convey in a short animation to open a conference, but they did not have a concept for the visual style that they wanted to use, or know exactly how they wanted to express their message. The open-endedness of the brief was a great opportunity for us to take the lead in script development alongside our friends from Brands At Work, and for one of our most talented animators to lean into her personal style when crafting a bold look for the piece.
‘Brilliant Together: AI Transformation in Western Europe’ is a sixty minute film that we made for Microsoft. It is centred around four documentary sections, two of which you can see excerpted here, each exploring an illuminating example of how the tech giant’s European subsidiaries are using AI technology for positive social impact: from educational outreach in Ireland, to cross-industry collaboration in Italy, via a healthcare start-up in Denmark and public sector auto-translation to help immigrants in Portugal.
These stories are rich in personal depth as well as technical detail, and the four tightly scheduled documentary shoots took us into the homes of the Microsoft employees leading these trailblazing projects, as well as into the working environments of Microsoft and their partner organisations.
Two other shoots, in Madrid and Copenhagen, added expert big-picture commentary from Microsoft’s Western Europe leadership team and a direct address from President Joacim Damgard, edited artfully in close collaboration with their comms team to create an hour packed with insight from the cutting edge of innovation, brought to life with cinematic production values and candid human connection.
The war in Sudan is a humanitarian crisis that is globally under-reported, and is having an enormous impact on the lives of millions of children and young people. UNICEF tasked Red Zebra with designing and realising a strategic event, with the aim of generating attention, political action and funds to help the youth of Sudan. Impactful video content would be a vital component. As Red Zebra’s trusted film-making department, we were involved from the very start of the lengthy development process.
A venue was chosen in Nairobi, Kenya, to enable active input and involvement from Sudanese people displaced by the war. That refugee community worked with UNICEF, partner NGOs, and frontline humanitarian workers, guided by Red Zebra’s expert facilitation, to create an agenda-setting event and influential social media campaign which would drive vital awareness of the ongoing tragedy of the war in Sudan.
Working with refugee children, and humanitarian workers in a war zone, was a humbling experience which challenged us in unique ways. For the event and for social media, the films that we made needed to be concise and impactful, scrupulously accurate in conveying a complex and fast-changing situation, and compliant with UNICEF’s media and safe-guarding standards. We are proud of our small contribution to the immensely important work that UNICEF have done to help the young people of Sudan.
We visited UNICEF’s fascinating Supply Division, to bring to life the connections between the fundraising parts of UNICEF and the complex logistical ‘machine’ that ensures critical resources are delivered fast and efficiently to those who need them, around the world. We used timelapse techniques to capture the automated machine processes in the Supply Division warehouse, while talking with the inspiring people who work there about the importance of what they do. We also filmed visitors from other parts of UNICEF, whose wonder at the cutting edge technology and ingenuity on display at Supply Division shone through in their interviews.
A local job in our home town of Brighton, we used continuous lighting to allow us to shoot both video and still photographs in parallel at this friendly boutique fitness space, working with the skilled Personal Trainers and their real-life clients to give an authentic representation of the range and spirit of the business, and delivering them a bumper pack of valuable content from a single day of production.
Our imagination was immediately sparked by the brief for this animation, developed by Brands At Work for pharmaceutical giant Kyowa Kirin. Their vision was to convey a guiding business message allegorically, through a magical tale that draws inspiration and imagery from Japanese folklore. We worked with the agency to develop their excellent script, before casting and recording a voice artist while building storyboards that were then brought to life by our talented animation team. The piece was a great success at a large company event, leading to further pieces in the same style being commissioned in Autumn of 2025.
Nine-year-old Cruz was born with a rare kidney condition and has been an Evelina London patient all his life. He visited the hospital four times a week for dialysis before receiving a kidney transplant in December 2021 – something he describes as “the best present ever”
This TV ad was shot on location in London. Working with a nine-year old with no previous experience of being on camera required sensitivity and adaptability — a challenge relished by our director, John. The work that we had done in pre-production with a storyboard artist was hugely helpful in helping Cruz understand what we were making together, like seeing a comic book of himself, which he could then act out, and our efforts were richly rewarded by his great heart and authenticity.
Evelina London, part of Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust, does incredible work caring for children and young people with serious health conditions. It was an honour to be able to support them in that work, and a humbling and uplifting experience to collaborate with them to devise and realise a succinct and powerful way to tell Cruz’s story.
UNICEF’s Global Office of Research and Foresight, based in the historic Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, does remarkable work that brings together academics, activists, experts and change-makers from governments and the private sector, connecting and combining their knowledge, insights and influence to bring about positive change in the lives of young people around the world.
Their Leading Minds events are a platform for thought leadership driven by young people, in which young activists from around the world gather to drive policy in a key area, chosen for importance in the lives of children and young people. The inaugural Leading Minds, co-hosted by the World Health Organisation, was focussed on mental health, and we were brought in to produce videos to support the work being done.
This process started with extensive pre-production, working with UNICEF Innocenti, alongside event producers and facilitators RedZebra, to hone the brief and determine what would be most useful to them — short video pieces that distilled the complex ideas being discussed at the conference into succinct but nuanced introductions to the subject, and evoked the unique, innovative format of the event. On location in the beautiful and bustling heart of Florence, we worked around the packed conference schedule to shoot extensive interviews with a wide range of the amazing people on site, immersing ourselves in the powerful ideas being discussed.
This job was made extremely special and rewarding for us by the same thing that makes Leading Minds what it is: the centering and leadership of young activists from all around the world — profoundly inspiring people who give great hope for the future in the way they are responding to the challenges of the present day.
UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) is a long-running programme that works with local governments to make urban environments healthier and more enriching for children and young people. Their 2019 summit in Cologne, Germany, brought together more than 600 participants from 180 cities all around the world: including mayors and other local leaders, technical experts, private sector partners, civil society organizations, academia, and, most importantly, children and youth activists. The goal was to advance the rights and well-being of children and young people through local commitment and action in the cities where they live, by giving children a voice beyond the CFCI and the Summit, ensuring commitments from local leaders and sharing good and innovative practices on local child rights action.
With RedZebra facilitating the packed schedule of plenaries, workshops, action groups and activities, our role was to capture the energy and ideas of this vibrant event in videos that would share and promote the work being done by CFCI and the achievements of the summit. Grabbing interviews with mayors, young activists and other delegates in between their many other commitments kept our small crew on its toes, but the passion, insight and drive of the young people and their allies was energising and inspiring, with their hope and strength shining through every shot.
This project for Jameson whiskey combined fire breathing, amazing mixology skills and a Phantom Flex camera capable of filming at 1000 frames per second, stretching a second into a minute.
The video was part of an end-to-end marketing package including a website, publicity stills and even a VR app featuring scenes with the same characters as this commercial!
Grace Jones is an icon of both fashion and film, so we really wanted to capture her hybrid style in this 360-degree commercial.
We were lucky to work with Lindy, she has such fierce presence she instantly transformed the studio into a one-woman catwalk.
Visually, Grace Jones is all about contrast, so we used close-ups and super slow motion to bring out Simon and Xoe’s killer combination of makeup and hair colour.
"For Every Child" is a UNICEF video which highlights the importance of realising children's rights as foreseen in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Shot on location at the UNICEF 2016 Private Sector Forum in Alicante, Spain.
We made this pre-event trailer for the award-winning Screamland at Dreamland, Margate. This exclusive evening event will immerse you in a frightening world of interactive scare mazes and sideshows set to thrill and haunt the darkest soul!
Filmed on location at Dreamland, Margate and in our studio here in Brighton.
We turned the story of an elderly Polish couple who had a wild night out at Fabric nightclub into a music video. The couple from Warsaw partied into the early hours despite being in their 70s, capturing the attention of the national press. They danced, enjoyed tequila shots and drank tea.
The video for the Armada Music re-release of Spankox's To The Club recreates their antics using even older actors Shirley and Tony Jaffe, a real life couple in their 80s. It also features fire breathing, a real club crowd and a lot of dirty dancing.
Tony Jaffe, 83, says: “Looking at the gorgeous bottom of an almost naked fire eater nearly gave me a heart attack. I’ve been dreaming about her at night!
“Parts of my body I had forgotten about seemed to come alive again and I was doing things I thought I could never do again.”
Shirley Jaffe, 81, who appeared in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, says: “My husband hasn’t been up for it for so long. I had no idea he could still do it.
Dreamland is BACK! And it's putting the heartbeat back into the seaside town of Margate. Reimagined from its vintage Pleasure Park roots, isn't it time you, your friends and your family discovered what all the fuss is about?
We had a blast making this TV Advert for Dreamland Margate's grand re-opening. Highlights included working with Vic Reeves. With thanks to our friends at ichikoo films.
