Davison
Strategic creative work — film and design
for organisations working for change.
Communicating your mission to have the impact you want is really hard. Tight constraints of budget and resource mean your output can end up... a bit average... and therefore largely ignored.
The work that actually moves people requires something different. Not just a better brief. A different kind of permission.
I work with people who are willing to not-know for a while. Who can tolerate provoking the harder questions that may lead to the work going somewhere unexpected. Who trust that discomfort in the process is usually a good sign.
Whatever the constraints you're working in, imagination is the thing that moves the dial. Imagination is the practice of bringing curiosity to possibility — noticing what's been closed off and asking why.
It doesn't require extra budget. Just the willingness to explore what's really possible.
Here's what that looks like in practice…
MNDA
A year after the Ice Bucket Challenge, the brief was essentially: follow that. Instead of noise, in contrast to the viral buzz, I made a moving film centring poignant shots of absence.
The film ends with a single statistic: half of those with motor neurone disease die within two years of diagnosis — a sensitive provocation to continue supporting the work of the charity beyond the hype.
Advance
The brief was a PDF learning resource. I made a documentary instead. Advance works with women with convictions — many carrying layers of unacknowledged loss. Loss of children, community, freedom. Grief that the system has no category for.
Rather than a conventional narrative arc, the film is structured around witnessing. No redemption. No resolution — but the experience of being seen, wherever you may be in the system.
—
Ray came to me with a communication challenge and an unusual quality: he was open to anything. Flex is built on a simple idea — that small, unfamiliar steps are how people actually change. So the film had to demonstrate that, not just explain it.
I filmed Ray at his rundown cottage on an island in the middle of a lake, accessible only by boat. The film explains the neuroscience behind behavioural change. But it was made by practising it.
tyllr
How do you move people to care about management training? You don't lead with the training. Five people — unnamed but fully present on screen — share experiences most organisations don't have language for. Racial identity. Neurodiversity. Menopause. Menstrual health. Pregnancy loss.
The films don't argue for better management. They make you feel what's at stake when it's absent.
More work
Selected clients
If something here has resonated, I'd like to hear your communication challenge. What often emerges, if we're willing to look beneath it, is something neither of us could have arrived at alone.
john@studiosyrup.comThe same practice, other forms.
Supporting coaches, consultants and founders to promote their ideas with clarity, resonance and depth.
Conversations about the habits, rituals and attention that fuel great creative work.
My art practice. Imagination without a brief.