Drax’s senior leadership conference and CEO Awards is the single biggest internal moment in their calendar, the point each year where the global workforce comes together to set the company’s direction for the decade ahead and recognise the people driving it. For 2026 they came to us with an unusually broad brief, and a significant amount of trust: deliver the entire content programme for the event, across their global operation, as one coordinated project.
That meant three distinct brand films, each doing a different job across the event. A series of over twenty award nominee films for the gala evening. A refreshed stills library and updated b-roll for every site we visited, replacing ageing assets across the business. And the photography and capture to support all of it.
Crucially, it meant doing this not from one location, but across Drax’s operation on both sides of the Atlantic. Power generation and pumped hydro in England and Scotland. Managed forests and pellet production in the US and Canada. One production team, 12 sites, three countries, a single connected body of work.
A project of this scale lives or dies on planning. Before a frame was shot we mapped the entire programme as one logistical and creative operation: which films needed which locations, where the nominee captures slotted in, how a stills library and b-roll refresh could be gathered in parallel without adding shoot days, and how a crew could move between continents while keeping everything on schedule for a fixed event date.
Creatively, we built the three films as a connected set rather than three separate pieces, each with its own job but sharing a visual language that carried the event’s “Together” theme from the opening keynote through to the awards dinner. The opener looks outward at what it takes to power a country. The second honours the people who do the work, built around a manifesto script and matching moments captured across every site. The third hands the film to colleagues themselves, their own words building to a single shared line.
Everything else was captured around that spine. While the film crew worked, we gathered a full editorial stills library and a refreshed bank of operational b-roll at each location, giving Drax an updated visual archive to draw on long after the event itself.
A multi-week production spanning England, Scotland, the US and Canada, from Selby to the Scottish Highlands, Louisiana to British Columbia. Our crew was briefed on each site’s safety protocols before arrival and worked around live operational environments throughout, from control rooms and turbine halls to pellet mills, dams and managed forest.
Over twenty nominee films were captured efficiently alongside the main shoots, cycling through contributors at each site, with remote capture filling the gaps for colleagues who couldn’t attend in person. The result was a single production that delivered an entire year’s worth of content in one coordinated effort.
