From Painting Cams to Guessing Games: Creative Content for Art & Culture
Museums are full of brilliant stories. The challenge is often finding the right way to tell them.
Sometimes that means slowing things down and inviting people to look more closely. Sometimes it means turning an object into a guessing game and sometimes it means making an exhibition trailer feel fast, stylish and full of energy.
Here are three museum projects where we took three very different creative approaches.
Royal Museums Greenwich: Faces of a Queen
For Royal Museums Greenwich, we produced a series of films for the Faces of a Queen exhibition.
The films featured a brilliantly varied group of contributors responding to portraits of Elizabeth I, including Mary Beard, Eunice Olumide, Daniel Lismore and the Pearly Queen of Royal Greenwich.
The brief was not simply to film people talking about paintings. We wanted to capture the act of looking itself: the scrutiny, the curiosity and the moment when someone leans in and starts noticing the details.
So we built what we called the painting cam.
We created a large replica of the artwork and placed the camera lens directly inside it. This meant each contributor was filmed from the painting’s point of view, as though the portrait was looking back at them.
The result was intimate, playful and visually distinctive. Contributors moved closer to the lens, studied the painting, reacted to details and spoke from a place of genuine observation. It gave the films a sense of immediacy that a standard interview setup would never have achieved.
Rather than telling viewers that these paintings deserved close attention, the films showed people looking, thinking and responding in real time.
Horniman Museum and Gardens: Guess the object
The Horniman Museum and Gardens is a family-friendly museum that connects people with global cultures, natural history and the world we all share.
For their Bloomberg app and social media channels, we produced a suite of short films that needed to feel warm, accessible and full of curiosity.
One of our favourite formats was a Guess the Object series.
The idea was simple: show an intriguing museum object, invite audiences to guess what it is, then reveal the answer in a follow-up film.
It was a small format with a lot of charm. Instead of presenting information in a formal way, the films created a moment of play. Viewers were encouraged to pause, look closely, make a guess and come back for the reveal.
For a museum like the Horniman, this approach felt like a natural fit. It was friendly, surprising and lightly educational, giving audiences a way into the collection that felt fun rather than instructional.
The National Gallery: Zurbarán
For The National Gallery, we created a dynamic trailer to promote the Zurbarán exhibition.
This called for a very different kind of energy.
The National Gallery has a premium, highly respected brand, so the film needed to feel elegant and stylish. But it also had to work online, where trailers need to grab attention quickly.
Our approach was to use fast-paced editing, striking details from the artworks and kinetic text to create a trailer with momentum.
The typography moved with purpose. The pacing created urgency. The visuals gave a sense of drama and scale. Rather than presenting the exhibition in a purely traditional way, the trailer brought a contemporary feel to historic paintings.
The result was a film that felt refined but energetic: high-quality, visually confident and designed to make audiences want to experience the exhibition in person.
Three institutions, three creative answers
Each of these projects needed a different approach because each museum had a different story to tell.
For Royal Museums Greenwich, we created a filming technique that helped audiences look more closely.
For the Horniman, we turned objects into a playful social format.
For The National Gallery, we used pace, typography and design to create a stylish exhibition trailer.
That is what we enjoy most about making content for museums: finding the format that fits the idea.