Category: Breakdown

Ahead of the 2024 Paralympic Games, UK broadcaster, Channel 4, came to us with a mission: to change the narrative around disability and sport by taking aim at patronising language and position one truth as undeniable. Paralympians are elite, world class athletes.   

 Tasked with creating four OOH posters to accompany their award winning Considering What? campaign, we needed to draw attention to four paralympic disciplines and the world-class British athletes preforming at the top of their game.  

The concept proved challenging, originally requiring multiple shoot locations. We proposed using CGI environments and a single, controllable shoot location and sourced a studio space perfect for the task.   

Paralympians never shy away from a challenge, and neither do we. Come shoot day, we were met with the complexities inherent in shooting athletes with disabilities and rose to the challenge. 

To accurately capture the grit and graft required for competing at their level, we needed the athletes to be genuinely competing. Meaning that the weightlifter is lifting real weights and the British wheelchair basketball team are pushing, tipping and careering their way around an invisible court (to be added later in post). Not only did we need to capture this from every angle using unique camera rigs set-ups, but we needed to record the action while keeping each athlete’s identity obscure – not yet knowing who would qualify and represent TeamGB.  

After two days shooting in the studio, we had all the ingredients to create some medal worthy OOH, heading into post production to create realistic sporting surfaces in CGI.  

We were proud to see the campaign win multiple awards, including a Bronze Shark in Photography for Print & Outdoor, Creative Excellence for Campaign’s In-House Agency Awards, Excellence awards in two categories for Marketing Week along with being shortlisted for Creative Review’s 2025 awards.  

But our favourite part?The prop helmet we bought for the wheelchair racing shoot was kept by the athlete and used during her Olympic race. That’s worth more than gold to us.

Happy hens lay tasty eggs in this cheery, upbeat spot.

On a thankfully sunny couple of days in September 2023, Curious ventured up north to one of Noble Foods best chicken farms, just outside of Nottingham, to capture real Happy Egg Co. farmers and their feathered friends.

Curious produced four TV spots and four radio spots to go live in February 2024. Everything from the kitchen table shots to all post-production were carried out at our studio in London. We handled everything from signed off creative, through to radio and TVC delivery. To check out how the shoot went down below, and for the final TVC click here

Our brief was to produce a standout PR campaign film, with eye catching photography, that promotes Knorr bouillon stock cubes in both a comedic and fashionable way featuring a micro handbag.​

​From the beginning we knew this project was going to require a full Curious cross department collaboration. Early in the development stage we decided that building the bag in CGI was going to be the most effective way to get in close and personal with our shots, this would give us maximum flexibility when exploring shape, texture and lighting with the super close ups, as well as building intrigue before the bag is revealed in its entirety.​

​We kicked off production by working closely with the designers of the real bag to digitally build, shape and texture the virtual bag to match the real one that would eventually be given away to influencers and prize winners.​

​Throughout the following weeks we continued to shape our pre-visualisations into a polished render whilst we were casting and styling to find a fierce fashion look to compliment the bag. After a fantastic fashion shoot, all the pieces finally came together and resulted in a campaign that is equal parts unique, hilarious and stylish.

The campaign was a huge success with 100 bags given away to influencers and prize winners across Italy and the USA, a live TV appearance and social hype. It created a big PR splash with dozens of glowing articles and reviews across marketing and advertising publications.

Below is a behind the scenes peak at what we got up to. For the full campaign video please click here and for the stills click here.

When Copa 90 were looking for someone to produce Pepsi’s UEFA Champion’s League social media image toolkit, Curious had the perfect solutions.

The brief was to create a suite of product focused assets that provide the opportunity to join the conversation during the football calendar with a particular focus on the UEFA CL partnership. This would be delivered through a series of fixed (predicted) and fluid (reactive) moments based on three core sets of assets: product stills, product moments & product films.

Dan Humphreys shot a week of motion and static scenarios in our Clerkenwell studios, followed by two weeks of post-production – cgi, retouching, editing and VFX – to create and deliver over fifty assets in a toolkit format. The shoot gave us the perfect opportunity to use a scaled down virtual studio set-up, using a cgi generated stadium on an LED screen as a backplate for the Pepsi player line up, as well as all the usual liquid tricks of the trade.

Consistency across the range was paramount, along with some clever production tricks coupled with our complete onsite team, meant Copa 90 and Pepsi could deliver the complete suite of assets within the tight budget and timeframe. Check out the full campaign here & here.

At Curious we have a dedicated team working for the award-winning retirement home developer, McCarthy Stone. Our dedicated team of brand guardians work alongside McCarthy Stone’s 25 regional managers, as well as the central marketing team, to deliver multidisciplinary marketing comms across their portfolio of products and services.

The Curious technology team developed a custom platform that works harmoniously with the existing McCarthy Stone internal marketing applications to help streamline the end-to-end process for creating and delivering all of their collateral across CRM, DD, DM, print media and events. Utilising the latest automation, review and digital asset management technologies, the platform provides a robust base to create and deliver content at speed and at scale.

We offer a focused and centralised marketing solution that allows McCarthy Stone to manage their marketing comms on a regional and central level via one simple tool. Utilising a fusion of digital asset management and automation functionality backed up with a dedicated team of brand guardians, McCarthy Stone are able to enjoy increased consistency in their brand messaging ensuring collateral is produced on brand, every time. The introduction of technology to the brand made reporting simpler and has enabled them to enjoy enhanced reporting and gain critical insights into activity and allows them to refine processes, increase efficiencies and value across their output.

With a brief from Aston Martin detailing ‘the birth of ultimate ferocity. Beautifully crafted and imbued with a powerful ferocity itching to get free. We see the cinematic unveiling of an invisible car through a ferocious fervent liquid’ we knew it was a brief we couldn’t wait to get dive in to.

Our challenge, making a cinematic fluid simulation-based reveal of the DBS that felt organic and ferocious. Time was of the essence; our team chose the industry disruptive Blender for its super-fast GPU based Cycles render engine. We realised early on that a full computationally heavy sim would not allow us to produce the film in time. Our intrepid team of 3D wizards decided to use Blender’s cutting-edge geometry nodes and math based procedural materials to sell the look of ferrous like fluids, whilst giving us full control over the art directable visuals and feel. The procedural approach allowed our team to go from previz to final renders within a month with many iterations the creative team could examine in near real-time. The final touches were done using Adobe After Effects and Black Magic’s Fusion.

Check out the master film here.

To support the launch the AEG’s Mastery kitchen range we created a series of films that highlight the sensory nature of the appliances. Working closely with creative agency Anomaly, Curious designed the kitchen set, storyboarded the script and produced a stills/film shoot. All offline & online post production was carried out by us too. This campaign touched through all our services we offer.

We delivered two 20” films in 3 languages, 10” cut downs, 6” gifs & full range of master print assets. Check out the work here.

We were commissioned to produce both moving and stills content for William Hill to be used throughout the 2019 / 2020 football season, continuing their new brand message of “The Brotherhood of Football”. Curious developed the idea and how this could be used across all of their BAU communications on all of their platforms.

Dan Humphreys (Director) & Andreas Neo (DOP) worked closely together on the best approach for the 2 day shoot with multiple recce’s of locations to ensure they worked from a creative and technical standpoint. Time was tight with just 3 weeks from agreeing budgets and creative until the first asset was required.

On the hottest two days of the year, and in an enclosed football dome with the temperatures soaring, we captured some incredible choreographed skills & drills with our friends at Playmaker on some pretty impressive kit including the Polaris Elite electric tracking vehicle from the team at Motion 24.

We delivered one stylised master edit as well as 25 retouched stills. William Hill had access to all of the footage and photography captured over the 2 days to regularly release new content through their in-house team. To maximise the time frame we had, our post production team were creating the full suite of 169 CGI football shirts throughout the process, as we’d developed an efficient production workflow to get these completed.

We also created supporting assets in our CGI studio to create replica football shirts as static and motion files. To date we have produced shirts for 192 teams across 6 leagues. Check out the full campaign here & here.