The annual Top 50 published by industry analysts Moving Image offers a state-of-the-nation snapshot of who’s hot and what’s interesting in the thriving corporate film sector. BFI curators Patrick Russell and Rebecca Vick dive into the detail.
2 April 2025
Online video being today’s key moving image form, creatively crafted film is an indispensable communications tool for companies, public bodies and not-for-profits. So comms filmmaking, traditionally termed ‘corporate film’ (though not all practitioners like its 1980s connotations), furnishes one of the digital mediasphere’s busiest corners.
Hence the sector’s 2025 UK Top 50, launched last week by industry analysts Moving Image in association with trade organisation EVCOM, makes essential reading. This annual league table ranking production companies and agencies working the comms film field is an engrossing state-of-the-nation snapshot, crunching data on company revenue, peer recognition, awards garnered and volume of projects delivered to produce the top of the pops.
Top producer, as last year, is Casual Films, whom we first tipped as one-to-watch back in 2012. Then a promising small business, they’re now thriving multinational video producers and consultant-strategists, with offices in nine cities worldwide. Not particularly focused on awards entries, they hit the top spot thanks to profitability, productivity and massive peer respect.
At numbers 2 and 3 sit two much longer-established competitors: DRPG, who operate across both film production and live events sectors, and film-focused The Edge Picture Company. Founded in 1980 and 1991 respectively, both are highly visible at awards ceremonies.
2024’s New York Festivals awarded DRPG editing gold for The Whole You, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) film for Canon which previously collected the editing award in London at 2023’s EVCOM Screen Awards. The Edge meanwhile took an NY award for an HSBC project marking World Mental Health Day. Having for many years won New York’s production company of the year, this time, reflecting that festival’s TV/corporates crossover, the accolade went to Zinc Media, now parent company for both The Edge and TV producers including Brook Lapping (themselves winning several awards in broadcast-focused NY categories).
The Edge’s 2024 EVCOM awards illustrate their strengths: stylistically versatile but especially noted for their short-form dramas with a cinematic aesthetic particularly suiting, among other things, health and safety messaging. A Day to Remember, for UK Power Networks, won EVCOM’s health and safety category. Senior creative Louisa van den Berg describes this as a “hard-hitting film [driving] home how important it is to learn from past mistakes, combining real failures from several incidents into one story… to make colleagues ask themselves: Why, after all those ruined lives, do we still keep bending the rules?”
Blending drama and documentary, Not Worth It, for high-volume comms-film customer (and frequent Edge client) Network Rail, took EVCOM’s coveted best direction prize. “Following a near-miss incident at a level crossing, we were asked for a powerful awareness film,” says creative director Nick Canner. “Key people involved took part: having everyone speak about their experience [caused] a phenomenal audience response, young people feeling moved to talk about their own attitudes and behaviours – and change them.”
Plastic Pictures, jumping three positions from last year, hits number 4. A production agency who like Casual have risen momentously in recent years, significantly they came second to them in the peer poll while topping the rankings for awards won, recognising their work’s artistic quality and human impact. Last year’s most awarded UK comms film was Plastic’s History of Technology, grabbing two gongs at the Cannes Dolphins (corporate’s answer to advertising’s Cannes Lions), three category prizes at EVCOM and EVCOM’s Grand Prix for 2024’s best film.
This peppy video takes a stylishly fast-moving, friendly approach to informative documentary-making. Creative director Samantha Gunn reflects: “HSBC has a legacy of embracing cutting edge technology, from telegrams to blockchain and biometrics…. [telling] this story of relentless customer-focused innovation we created a thumb-stopping film with a look we characterised as ‘Wes Anderson through the ages’”. By topping both brand communication and internal comms categories, this project demonstrates how identical content can reach different audiences on different platforms simultaneously, with impressive metrics.