A slow start, then the busiest run in over 10 years
Here is the honest version of 2026 so far. The first quarter was lean enough to be worrying. The middle of the year has been the opposite: new clients, several household-name brands, some with turnovers approaching £100 million, alongside clients who have been with us since the very beginning.
If your own first quarter felt quiet, take this as the only reassurance that actually helps. It comes back. It always comes back. The freelance and small-agency world runs in tides, and the slow months are usually the ones just before the busy ones.
We also spent a chunk of the year building. We moved out of Cheltenham a while ago, spent a stint in Gloucester, and have now settled into a new studio I put together largely by hand: cladding, plasterboard, flooring, paint, the lot. Full camera kit, edit screens, a couple of bikes in the corner. It turns out a space you have wired and painted yourself is a very easy place to make things in.
The Vax ad: one product, 20 seconds, everything in-house
Vax make handheld vacuums, carpet washers, and the like. The brief was a short retail and online commercial, roughly 20 seconds, punchy and fast, built on unusual angles and quick transitions. On paper it is simple: a product, in use. In practice, a clean 20-second cut takes a fair amount of creative reverse engineering.
We handled all of it internally, from taking the brief through scripting, storyboarding, casting, finding locations, producing, and the final edit. The on-set crew was small by design: me directing, Barney on camera as director of photography, and Liam assisting, plus the client team and our cast. Being lean does not stop you delivering a high-key, high-polish commercial where the product is gleaming and there is not a mark on it.
That project is the window for the rest of this piece. Here are four things one small commercial tells us about where the craft is going.
Why commercial video is going wide, and a little unstable
For about five or six years, the trend in product work was tight. Macro shots, shallow focus, everything cropped in on texture and detail. That has flipped. The interesting work now goes wide, sometimes absurdly so.
On Vax we leaned on an ultra-wide 10mm to 12mm lens, shot open gate, which is to say using the full sensor rather than a cropped frame. It gives you a playful, slightly exaggerated frame with the product proud in the centre and plenty of room around it. Keep the product centred and you can pull a clean 16:9 crop out of the middle later, while the full wide shot gives context on where you actually are. Do not be afraid of wide shots.
The other shift is motion. Almost everything shot in the last few years has been locked to a gimbal, with the horizon pinned dead level. We used FPV drones on this one, flown by licensed pilots, and part of what makes them work is that the horizon tilts and rolls as the drone moves. There is a reason that reads as more alive. Your audience's brain is a prediction engine, and a perfectly stabilised, perfectly level shot is easy to predict and easy to tune out. A frame that moves the way a real body moves keeps the eye guessing, and a guessing brain keeps watching. Plenty of people are quietly ditching their gimbals and going back to looser, more manual movement for exactly this reason.
Two quieter shifts in how the work gets sold
The first is rights. A lot of the industry is still tangled up in usage terms, licensing windows, and re-clearance fees. We have gone the other way. On a project like Vax, the client gets everything: every take, graded and raw, to use wherever and for as long as they like. It is simpler for them, and it has quietly become one of our stronger selling points.
The second is the rise of the content capture day. More and more clients do not want a single scripted hero film; they want a bank of on-brand, high-quality images and clips with no fixed use case attached. We come in for a day, shoot a large volume of graded content, and hand it over to the client, their in-house team, or their social partner. They then drip-feed it across their channels for the next 6 to 12 months. We have done these for restaurants and food brands, tech companies, even accountancy firms. One day, one concentrated hit, months of material.
What to actually take from this
If you shoot product or brand work, try one concrete thing on your next job. Frame a hero shot on a 10mm or 12mm lens, open gate, with the product dead centre, and see how much more usable that single setup becomes. If you commission video, and your last six months of social posts have felt thin, book a content capture day rather than another one-off film. And if you are a freelancer staring down a quiet spell, the useful takeaway is the least glamorous one: hold your nerve.
This was our first proper video recap, filmed start to finish in the new studio. If the format is useful, we will keep making them. Either way, the Vax cut is a fair marker of where we are right now, and a reasonable bet on where the craft is heading next.
