Arthian

The brief

Arthian is a multidisciplinary consultancy providing integrated engineering, sustainability, planning and development services, with offices across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Its own description of itself is a business shaped by expertise and powered by people, and that second half is the harder one to show.

Two occasions needed filming. The first was thirty years of trading, reached in 2026. The second was the annual staff training day, which for a consultancy spread across four countries is the one occasion in the year when people from every office are in the same room at the same time.

Both films were for an audience that is largely internal. That changes the brief. A film made for prospective clients can afford to explain the company from the outside. A film made for the people who are the company has to be recognisable to them, because they were there and they will know immediately if it is not true.

The approach

I filmed and edited all three films myself. On a single day with one operator, a conference is mostly a problem of coverage: there is one run at every session, no second take of a keynote, and a constant choice between staying on the speaker and turning round to film the room listening to them.

What I remember from the 2025 day at the Radisson Blu in Glasgow is how well everyone got on and how much energy there was in the room. That is a difficult thing to film deliberately and an easy thing to miss, because it does not happen on the stage. It happens in the queue for coffee, in the conversation that carries on after a workshop has closed, in the moment two people from different offices work out they have been emailing each other for two years. Those margins are where an internal film either earns its keep or does not.

The training day produced two cuts from the same material rather than one. The full highlight film runs to a minute and a half and is built for people who were not there, so it has to carry the shape of the day and some sense of the scale of the business. The 39 second edit is built for people who were, and for social, where the opening seconds decide whether anyone watches the rest.

The anniversary film took the opposite approach to most anniversary films. A list of dates has an audience of nobody, so the thirty years became a way of explaining what the business does now rather than a chronology for its own sake.

The outcome

Arthian commissioned the training day again for 2026, and extended the relationship beyond single events into a quarterly programme of films about individual members of staff, interview-led and built with archive footage.

That progression is the part worth noting. A company that describes itself as powered by people has committed to putting one of those people on camera every quarter, which is a more demanding test of the claim than any single film. It also answers the question most corporate clients are really asking when they commission a first film, which is not whether one video can be made well, but whether the same person can be relied on to keep making them.

The thinking behind the work is set out in the journal: Internal Communications Video.