University of Hull – Faculty Student Recruitment Campaign

The Challenge

The University of Hull required a series of high-end video adverts to support its student recruitment campaigns, with each film representing a different faculty while aligning with a newly developed brand identity.

The challenge was to create eight individual adverts that each felt distinct in tone, subject and audience, while maintaining a consistent visual style across the full campaign.

Each faculty needed to be represented authentically, reflecting both the academic environment and the real student experience. That meant avoiding a generic campus film and instead finding the moments, spaces and interactions that made each subject area feel credible.

The project also involved a high level of coordination. Multiple faculties, locations, stakeholders and schedules had to be managed within tight timeframes, with limited access to teaching environments and live university settings.

Balancing creative ambition with logistical complexity was central to the brief: every film needed to feel considered and cinematic without losing the efficiency required to deliver eight adverts as one campaign.

The Approach

We led the project from concept through to delivery, working closely with the university’s marketing team to shape the narrative direction and keep the campaign aligned with the wider recruitment strategy.

Each advert was carefully planned around the character of its faculty while following a consistent visual and storytelling framework. That gave every film its own identity without allowing the campaign to become visually fragmented.

Production was structured across multiple shoot days, with dedicated filming time for each faculty. We captured real teaching environments, student interaction and subject-specific scenarios rather than relying on generic university imagery.

Real students were used throughout the campaign rather than actors, helping the films feel more relatable and giving prospective applicants a stronger sense of the environments and experiences they could expect.

Extensive pre-production planning was essential, including scripting, storyboarding, location planning and coordination with faculty teams. That preparation allowed a complex multi-film schedule to move efficiently while protecting production quality across all eight adverts.

Eight Films. One Campaign.

The scale of the project meant consistency mattered as much as individuality.

The campaign covered Computer Science, Environmental and Life Sciences, Midwifery, Hull University Business School, Film or Media, Nursing, Psychology and Sports. Each subject brought a different visual language, student audience and set of filming requirements.

Rather than forcing every faculty into the same formula, we used a shared production language around cinematography, pacing, authenticity and brand treatment, then allowed the content itself to change around each discipline.

That meant a health-focused film could feel completely different from a Film and Media advert, while both still clearly belonged to the same University of Hull recruitment campaign.

The result was a campaign designed to work both at scale and at faculty level: consistent enough to strengthen the university brand, but specific enough to make each audience feel that the film was made for them.

The Result

We delivered a complete campaign of eight cinematic one-minute adverts, each tailored to a specific faculty and unified through a consistent visual identity.

Across the campaign, the films generated close to 1 million views, supporting the University of Hull’s wider marketing and student recruitment activity.

The films focus on authentic student experiences, showing teaching, collaboration and university life in a way that feels natural rather than staged. Using real students and real environments helped build credibility and gave prospective applicants a clearer sense of what studying each subject could actually feel like.

The content was designed for use across multiple recruitment touchpoints, including the university website, social media, open days and wider digital campaign activity.

Beyond the individual films, the project gave the University of Hull a substantial bank of premium faculty-level content that could communicate different parts of the institution without sacrificing consistency at campaign level.

The campaign forms part of Astor’s wider higher education work, where the challenge is rarely simply to make campus look good. The stronger opportunity is to help prospective students understand the experience, environment and decisions behind choosing where and what to study.