Cambridge Festival

Challenge

The Cambridge Festival runs at real scale, with hundreds of events spread across venues and formats. The challenge is coverage that feels coherent rather than scattered: showing the range of ideas while still making the Festival feel human, accessible, and worth showing up for. In 2025 alone, the Festival welcomed 45,000 visitors across 385 events, which gives you a sense of the pace and complexity involved.

‍

What we did

We treated the Festival as a long-running collaboration, not a one-off shoot. That meant planning coverage that could hold up across multiple days and locations, then moving quickly on the ground to capture both the big moments and the quieter ones that tell you what it’s like to be there. Across the programme, we produced a gallery of still images that balances speakers, audiences, venues, and atmosphere, wrote and shaped narrative interview material so the Festival’s messaging stayed consistent, and created a promotional video that could carry the energy of the programme in a single, shareable piece.

‍

Outcome

The work gives the Festival a reliable visual and editorial layer year after year: content that supports promotion while the programme is live, and an archive that reflects the breadth of what took place once it’s over. It also creates continuity across a fast-moving schedule, helping the University present the Festival not as isolated events, but as one joined-up celebration of research, creativity, and public conversation.