Double success at the Lens awards

Limehouse went home with not one but TWO gold trophies at the recent Lens Awards for a gamechanging eLearning project.

We won gold in two categories: Best Creative Execution, and Best Video for an Internal Audience.

Our project was recognised for its groundbreaking approach to both the tone and style of the film, and the creative design and execution.  

Our client’s previous attempts at eLearning on this topic were lengthy, text-based solutions that read more like a policy manual. Our starting point, backed up by years of experience, is that learning content has to be engaging and memorable in order to be effective.

There’s no escaping the fact that the content we had to cover - largely around policy and process - was incredibly dry and technical. We knew the information had to be presented clearly, concisely and accurately. And the audience typically hold more senior roles in the organisation. So the solution had to appeal to them, which meant pitching the information at exactly the right level, wrapped up in an engaging and creative medium.

We knew a presenter would be needed, someone who could bring the content to life in an engaging way. The dilemma was how to make the dry material interesting.

In one of our initial creative sessions, some recent Wes Anderson films were brought up. He’s developed a distinct style of dialogue straight to camera - both in the visuals and the words being spoken - and we knew this could be the perfect solution. 

Referring back to the policy content, we proposed using a relatable metaphor to help bring the process to life. The idea of maintaining a home was a natural fit - something most of us are familiar with, and that has many parallels in terms of our learners’ responsibilities.

The two elements combined to inform the character of our presenter - a man who, through a combination of inheritance and good fortune, has found himself to be the owner of a stately home. He’s massively unsuited to the task of maintaining such a property, being largely shielded from the realities of everyday life up to this point.

We scouted suitable locations before settling on Allerton Castle in North Yorkshire. A huge stately home that offered a variety of perfect shooting locations for the scenes we’d planned - a library, games room, elaborate halls and grounds.

We knew much of the content would need visuals aids to support its explanation - infographics, process maps, and so on. A scroll of architectural blueprint paper is unrolled on a large desk early in the film. Cutting sealmessly to an overhead shot, we then use this as the backdrop for animated motion graphics depicting the relevant processes.

In another scene, our presenter uses an old slide projector to illustrate certain concepts. We comped in the relevant images in post-production, opting for a mix of abstract and retro photos. And we used a an old CRT TV on as plinth to present 8-bit style motion graphics. 
All our hard work and creativity paid off in the results: 98.7% of the target audience successfully completed the learning within one month of launching, and it received a score of 4.81 out of 5 from colleagues - the highest user rating ever for a piece of learning delivered by our client.
And, of course, those two gold awards.