LSBU 'The Making of You' Campaign

// services

Motion Design

Campaign Strategy

Video Production

Animated illustration Solarflare created for LSBU's 'Making of You' recruitment campaign with Curly Films and Animade, targeting first-generation students from South London.

Animation as emotional argument

Recruitment films for universities live or die on whether the target audience sees themselves in them. LSBU's 'Making of You' campaign was aimed squarely at first-generation students from South London, young people for whom university is not an obvious next step. The film, produced by Curly Films and animated by Animade, needed to close that gap between aspiration and reality. Our role was to bring the animated illustration layer to life in a way that amplified the live-action footage rather than competing with it.Animation in this context is not decoration. It is the part of the film that says things the camera cannot: the internal shift that happens when someone starts to believe a path is possible for them. We worked closely with Animade on the integration so that the transitions between live-action and illustrated sequences felt earned rather than stylistic.

Serving a first-generation audience

Everything about the campaign's tone was calibrated for an audience that has good reasons to be sceptical of institutional marketing. We kept the animation warm without being saccharine, specific without being prescriptive. The 'Making of You' message only works if the viewer believes it refers to them personally, not to a composite student invented by a brand team.That meant resisting the pull toward abstraction. The illustrated sequences stay close to the lived texture of South London: the streets, the commute, the domestic detail. When animation lifts away from that, it does so to represent possibility rather than escape. The distinction matters to the audience even if they could not articulate it.

Collaboration across three studios

Projects like this require a particular kind of production discipline. Curly Films held the live-action timeline, Animade held the illustration system, and we worked across both to keep the animated sequences technically clean and editorially consistent as the cut evolved. Frame-accurate handoffs between live and animated sections meant that any edit change upstream had consequences for the animation, and we built review loops into the schedule to catch those early.The finished film ran across LSBU's digital recruitment channels and outreach programme. Its effectiveness rests on the quality of the collaboration between all three studios, and on the decision to treat the animation as integral to the argument rather than an afterthought added in post.

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