SECTOR:
ENTERTAINMENT
YEAR:
2014
ROLE:
CREATIVE
Night at the museum
Conquest of the Skies.
Sky’s 3D channel needed its two biggest tentpole events to feel genuinely unmissable, not just technically impressive, but emotionally engaging. These weren’t ordinary commissions. Natural History Museum Alive and Conquest of the Skies were flagship productions from the double BAFTA-winning partnership between Sky and David Attenborough, broadcast on New Year’s Day and Christmas respectively.
Beyond the creative challenge, there was a practical one: I was directing David Attenborough himself on both shoots for the campaign materials. Getting the right performance, the right tone, and the right moments from someone of his calibre, and doing it efficiently, required a different kind of preparation than any other talent work I’d done. I was writing and directing the specially filmed promo inserts with Attenborough himself.
For Conquest of the Skies we took three hundred million years of flight, compressed into one campaign. The campaign needed to capture that scale - expedition, discovery, spectacle - while still feeling personal to the man at its centre.
Concept:
Final OOH:
Night at the museum.
For Natural History Museum Alive, the creative territory was wonder at night. The film’s central conceit, extinct creatures coming to life inside the Natural History Museum after dark, was the campaign too. We leaned into the cinematic nature of it: one of the world’s most familiar buildings, one of the world’s most familiar faces, and something genuinely impossible happening inside.
The storyboards drove the key art - a direct line from pencil to poster.
Concept:
Final OOH:
These shows were a huge collaboration with Sky and cemented a partnership that had become the gold standard for prestige factual broadcasting in the UK.
Directing David Attenborough across both productions, writing the inserts, briefing him on set, shaping the performances that became the campaign, remains some of the most demanding and quietly extraordinary work of my career.
testimonial.
The story of evolutionary flight is one I’ve always wanted to tell in 3D. This is a wonderful campaign bringing to life a very exciting project
Sir David Attenborough
National Treasure
