The Brief

Akeley Wood School wanted to create a fresh suite of content that could communicate what makes the school special while giving its marketing team the flexibility to speak to different audiences across multiple platforms.

Akeley Wood is a co-educational school for pupils from Nursery through to Sixth Form, with a strong emphasis on individuality, opportunity and preparing young people for life beyond school.

Rather than creating a single film in isolation, the ambition was to build a broader bank of visual content that could work throughout the admissions journey, from first awareness through to families actively considering the school.

Our challenge was therefore to capture the spirit of Akeley Wood while creating enough variety for the content to work across the school’s website, organic social channels, paid campaigns and wider marketing activity.

Our Approach

We centred the project around the people who experience Akeley Wood every day.

Through a combination of student and parent voices, observational footage and carefully planned moments across the school, we built an authentic picture of the community rather than relying solely on traditional school messaging.

The main brand film brought these perspectives together into one overarching story, capturing the energy, relationships and opportunities that define life at Akeley Wood.

Alongside this, we planned the production from the outset with shorter-form content in mind.

Rather than simply cutting shorter versions of the main film, we identified individual stories and themes that could become standalone pieces of content — allowing the school to communicate specific messages to specific audiences.

One Production. Multiple Stories.

From the wider production, we created a suite of up to 10 social-first films, exploring areas including:

Parent Voice
Giving prospective families the opportunity to hear directly from parents about their experience of the school and community.

Student Voice
Putting pupils at the centre of the storytelling and allowing their personalities and experiences to communicate what life at Akeley Wood really feels like.

Sixth Form
A dedicated look at the Sixth Form experience and the independence, support and preparation it provides for students taking their next steps.

Community
Capturing the relationships between pupils, staff and families and the sense of belonging that runs throughout school life.

The resulting content gave Akeley Wood a much deeper library of stories to use throughout the year, rather than relying on a single hero film.

Built for Paid Campaigns

The project also extended into performance marketing.

We created dedicated advertising assets for Sky AdSmart, adapting the wider creative into concise, targeted films designed to introduce Akeley Wood to prospective families in their own homes.

This meant the same creative campaign could work across different stages of the admissions funnel — from high-impact awareness advertising through to social content and the deeper storytelling of the main brand film.

Photography Alongside Film

Alongside the moving-image production, we captured a comprehensive suite of photography across the school.

By producing film and photography together, we were able to create a consistent visual identity across the campaign while giving the marketing team a much broader library of assets for use across the website, social media, advertising, prospectuses and future campaigns.

The Outcome

The result was much more than a single school film.

We created an interconnected content suite designed around how a modern school actually communicates: a flagship brand story supported by audience-specific social content, paid advertising assets and a versatile photography library.

Deliverables included:

• Flagship brand film
• Up to 10 social-first edits
• Parent voice content
• Student voice content
• Sixth Form content
• Community-focused content
• Sky AdSmart advertising assets
• Full photography suite

Together, the content gives Akeley Wood the flexibility to tell one consistent story in multiple ways — meeting prospective families wherever they are in their journey with the school.

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