How Kew Gardens beat their conversion targets by 98% with our video ads
“Lamplight were with us every step of the way and the finished film looked amazing, really capturing the spirit of the project.”
Kew Gardens has 250 years of prestige to protect, so making a campaign of over 50 different videos with varying lengths, shots and aspect ratios is a creative challenge. When the campaign features digital artwork by industry leaders Marshmallow Laser Feast, it’s a serious creative challenge. In filmmaking, flexibility and high-gloss do not always go hand-in-hand, but for this campaign; they had to.
The Art
Of the Oak is an immersive digital art installation created by Marshmallow Laser Feast. Through an interactive audio visual installation and an online field guide, the artwork creates a sensory experience that helps viewers understand the importance of Kew’s Lucombe Oak as an active ecosystem.
The Campaign
Before Of the Oak debuted, Lamplight produced the live action campaign for Kew’s digital channels. The objective was to drive visitors to view the artwork, communicating the immersive and interactive experience to a new audience.
The Shoot
We had one day in April to create the film for 3 aspect ratios, and tell a story in 6, 15 & 60 seconds. MLF directed our cast of four actors, ensuring that they showed off the interactivity of the installation and meditations. We deployed a small crew of 3, augmented with help from the team at MLF, led by producer Roxie Oliveira. Creative Director Callum led the camera team, using a mixture of static, gimbal and slider shots to motivate the audience’s journey into the artwork. We shot full-frame and open-gate (the secret sauce to making a single shot work for your three aspect ratios) on cinema lenses. Making Of the Oak’s large low-pixel-pitch screen seem like a clear window was its own technical challenge. To learn more about this, here’s our previous essay on the moire effect.
In post-production, Cinematographer & Colourist Jonny created a colour grade to bring the footage we’d captured in-line with existing visual references from MLF. As an artist collective, it’s important that video content showing their work has a consistent visual style across all their projects. Our open gate canvas and careful reframing allowed one shot to serve multiple aspect ratios in the edit, without looking like it had been cropped or compromised.
Over the summer, the campaign across Meta and Google delivered over 1000 ticket sales, with 98% more direct conversions than targeted - a great result for Kew and for MLF.
Roxie said: “Lamplight were great to work with on the promo for our Of the Oak project at Kew Gardens. Professional, collaborative, and great value. They were with us every step of the way and the finished film looked amazing, really capturing the spirit of the project.”
Roxie said:
“Lamplight were great to work with on the promo for our Of the Oak project at Kew Gardens. Professional, collaborative, and great value. They were with us every step of the way and the finished film looked amazing, really capturing the spirit of the project.”
Thank you to Marshmallow Laser Feast for inviting us to collaborate on this campaign for Of the Oak, we’re really proud of what we created together.
