Kew Gardens

We were approached by Kew Gardens to create a captivating TV advert for artist Marc Quinn’s ‘Light into Life’ exhibition.  The brief called for a 30-second, voice-over led hero film, plus several shorter edits designed for maximum impact on social media.

Kew were keen to include cinematic visuals of recognisable and behind-the-scenes Kew locations, impactful shots of Marc’s installations, and intricate close-ups of key plants. We also created a voice over script for Marc, explaining the inspiration he gathered at Kew.

We compiled a pitch deck with a choice of creative options for the client to choose from. We worked closely with the team at Kew to refine the creative and storyboard, pinpointing exactly what they wanted for the 30-second ad.

Filming took place over three days. On the first day, we recorded Marc’s voice over and shot footage of him at Kew. On the second day, we captured b-roll of the sculptures and aerial footage, starting at 5am, well before the gates opened to the public. It was an early 3:30am wake up call for the team! Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t ideal, so we reshot all of the drone footage on a third, much sunnier day.

As a result of our successful creative, we won a 24-month video marketing contract with Kew.

The tight deadlines required a quick edit turn around. Throughout post production, we worked with Clearcast and Copy Central to ensure the storyboard was cleared for Sky TV ahead of completion. This ensured that the final edit was cleared quickly upon delivery.

As well as the 16×9 hero TV commercial, we delivered 13 versions of the edit for social media marketing, in a variety of aspect ratios and durations.

Kew were keen to show the sculptures in full, rather than use close ups of the sculptures to tease their presence. This limited the style of shots we could capture, but we leaned into the idea of match cuts to jump from sculpture to sculpture. However, this also made reformatting certain shots to a vertical format quite difficult as some of the sculptures were so large! As a solution, we used content aware fill extend certain shots, allowing them to work in a 9×16 and 1×1 frame.

To make the wider sculpture shots more impactful, we used Angenieux zoom lenses to create a dolly zoom effect. All ground level footage was shot on the Alexa Mini, while the aerials were captured with an Inspire 3.