Derwent is a brand of pencils and other stationery dating back to 1832! Being one of the oldest pencil and art supply companies in the world, Derwent’s name is synonymous with quality as well as creative potential. There is even a Derwent Pencil Museum up in their Lake District home. Derwent produce pencils, blocks, pens, paints, paper and all sorts of accessories that the budding artist is able to get excited about using in order to bring their vision to life.

Nomadic UK has been lucky enough to work regularly with Derwent, producing their video content since 2021. Over the last two years, we have created a wide range of video content for them, from New Product Development videos for social media to training videos for retail staff B2Bs. We’ve filmed slow mo, macro and we’ve even filmed interviews, and they’ve all been tremendously exciting projects due to the creative potential of the products.

When we started filming for Derwent, Nomadic UK was comprised of just business directors Amy and Tom and now, two years on, the whole company gets involved. On our most recent shoot, there were 8 of us on set as opposed to our very first filming project, which was just Amy and Tom with one Derwent artist ambassador present to create the art work. For that very first shoot, we didn’t even have a Derwent representative present due to Covid still being a very present part of all of our lives. Because of this, our Derwent representative monitored the shoot remotely via WhatsApp instead! This is a service we still offer to clients who are far away.

Derwent and Nomadic share a love of creative expression and freedom, which is why we’re such a great partnership and it’s why we relish making their promotional and educational videos. This means that Derwent shoots are something we always look forward to in our filming calendar.

Working with a company over a prolonged period means that you can build up a rapport, speeding up the communication process, and become incredibly familiar with their brand guidelines and how they do things, streamlining the whole project to everyone’s benefit.

One of our recent projects together involved filming two Deep Dive hero product videos and a series of very short social ads of 5-10 seconds in duration. All of the filming content we were to deliver also needed to be translated in Italian, French, Spanish and German, which is a typical feature of a Derwent video project. On this particular shoot, we worked with our Derwent representatives plus the friendly team at Story to create a colourful, dynamic series of video assets to help launch the newly extended series of 100 Inktense pencils. This launch extends the collection from 72 colours to 100. This was an exciting and momentous step for Derwent, and the assets needed to reflect the exciting step forward.

Having over 2 years of experience working with Derwent, we understand what works on screen and their key selling points. Part 1 of the launch assets for Inktense 100 Pencils saw us filming in a studio in Cheltenham capturing dynamic bold new content for the product launch. To help us show off the concept, we hired a super slow mo camera, which was a first for a Nomadic x Derwent shoot allowing us to capture powder flying through the air in slow motion.

We used our tried and tested cinematic Sony FX6 to capture the rest of the content. Crispin, our in-house gaffer, set up the film lights as well as handling the photography whilst Tom was filming using the Sony FX6. Kristen and Amy worked side-by-side producing the shoot as there was so much involved in getting everything to be filmed. We were squirting paint pigment into a fish tank and filming the colour exploding over and over again with the colours being swapped regularly. This meant that there was a lot of running back and forth to empty and clean the fish tank, as well as preparing the paint pigment solution.

Untypical of a product shoot for Derwent, we needed some foley of the products being used, so we recorded some ASMR-type sounds on our in-house sound studio equipment, which was then added to the footage later during post-production. After that we were able to chuck on some tunes and enjoy the creative freedom of making paint explode in water and exploring ways of making piles of paint powder explode into the air by hitting the board from underneath with a big stick. And the results turned out great!

The photos were used by Derwent on their stand at a huge trade show in Frankfurt, called CreativeWorld. The stall looked incredible and it was fantastically rewarding to see all of our hard creative work blown up for all the world to see!

We also ended up creating two hero videos as well as a series of short social videos for use on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Take a look at the two hero videos at the start of this blog and below:

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