Amplify Your Research • Engage Meaningfully • Inspire Change
Research reaches its full potential when it connects with the world beyond academia. Public engagement is not an add-on, it’s an opportunity to listen, collaborate, and co-create with communities, policy-makers, and audiences who can benefit from and contribute to your work.
At Preston Street Films, we help researchers bring their ideas to life through film, audio, photography, design, and creative workshops – turning insights into accessible, compelling stories that resonate with diverse audiences.
“Involving people in research and innovation makes it more relevant and useful for everyone.”
UKRI public engagement strategy
Case Study: Places of Poetry
We were commissioned by the University of Exeter to create a series of short films to support The Places of Poetry project. The project centres around a map of England and Wales and allows people to ‘pin’ original poems to places.This documentary film was conceived as a piece that would give viewers the necessary information about the project, feature some of the poets and their poetry from around the country, and also have a feeling of poetry at its heart.
Presented by the poet and writer Paul Farley and featuring the work of poets from Stroud, Portsmouth and Liverpool it takes us on a journey to explore a small sample of the Places of Poetry project.
Why This Approach Works
- Purpose-Driven Story Telling
We work with you to clarify what your research can offer and how it can make a difference, crafting narratives that connect meaningfully with the people who matter most. - Inclusive Engagement
From community groups to regional audiences, our productions are designed to be co-produced, participatory, and sensitive, ensuring diverse voices are heard and celebrated. - Strategic Impact
We support planning at every stage – from grant proposals to public-facing content, helping ensure engagement efforts are credible, measurable, and impactful. - Reach and Recognition
Our work is built to travel beyond traditional academic spaces: podcasts, festivals, broadcast radio, and digital platforms help research reach regional, national, and global audiences.
“Involving people in research and innovation makes it more relevant and useful for everyone.”
UKRI public engagement strategy
Case Study - BBC Ideas and the University of Oxford: The Surprising Benefits of Exercising with Friends
BBC Ideas aims to bring complex academic concepts and. research to a wide audience through short, engaging and informative documentary films. We have made ten films for the strand, working in partnership with institutions including the University of Oxford, The Open University and The Royal Society.
The film explores research carried out by Dr Arran Davis at the University of Oxford that suggests that exercising with other people can have benefits over exercising alone. For more information visit the University website here.
What we offer
- Documentary Films & Case Studies
Bring research to life with rich, human-centred storytelling that captures attention and imagination. - Podcasts & Audio Productions
Engage audiences with accessible, high-quality audio that conveys expertise in a relatable way. - Creative Workshops & Training
Build capacity for storytelling within your team, covering audio, video, photography, and design – empowering researchers to share their work confidently. - Multi-Channel Engagement Support
From digital content strategy to social media planning, we help ensure your research connects with audiences far beyond academia.
“Involving people in research and innovation makes it more relevant and useful for everyone.”
UKRI public engagement strategy
Public Engagement Is Encouraged and Fundable
UKRI’s public engagement guidance urges applicants to include engagement activities at the start of the project and to budget for them. Creative media formats such as video or podcasting count as valid engagement modes
Stronger funding bids
Embedding creative media, such as short videos or podcasts, within a research proposal aligns with UKRI and AHRC expectations for impact and engagement. These formats are most effective when they are integrated from the start, clearly linked to impact objectives, and budgeted for as part of the project.
That’s where we come in. We work with academics and research teams from the early stages of funding bids, helping to shape engagement plans that are purposeful, fundable, and aligned with UKRI guidance. By consulting at the outset, we ensure that creative media is not an afterthought but a strategically designed element that strengthens your Case for Support and demonstrates how your research will reach and resonate with wider audiences.
Case Study - BBC Radio 4, Strandings
Podcasts and Audio
A powerful way to generate impact is through audio productions. Whether it is an ongoing podcast or a one-off documentary story, audio is an effective way to engage audiences with interesting research projects and the people of your department. It’s also relatively easy, cheap and quick to produce.
“Podcasts provide a cheap and effective way to deliver audio content to your audiences.”
Through a series of conversations, a podcast series can create a body of work that highlights interesting research stories/findings. The potential here is vast, for example: behind-the-scenes insight into a project, exchange of ideas between academics, cross-discipline exchanges with other departments and many other formats.
Training
Whether it is a remote location or a budget constraint, we understand that sometimes you cannot hire professional help to create the content you need. Building some basic creative capacity within your team will give you the confidence to capture interesting moments in high quality.
We can provide in-depth and bespoke training in a number of areas to help you and your team capture important moments as they happen. These include: shooting video, photography, video editing, sound recording, and audio editing. We can provide training on high end professional equipment, or help you make the most of the equipment you already have such as your mobile phone.
Creative Workshops
Having a creative professional in a room of academics can help facilitate a different way of thinking that is outside the academic box. We can arrange workshops in a range of creative disciplines including graphic design, collage, drama and more.
A recent example is a Poster Workshop for The Department of Archaeology and History at the University of Exeter. We ran a one day design workshop with academics into how they could approach creating research project posters in a different, more creative way. The results were fantastic; the posters they created have been exhibited in the university and the creative techniques they learned will inform their approach to academic future communication.
“it was great to see the conversations and creative process in action and we are very pleased with the result”
University of Exeter
Social Media
We can create content specifically for social media to drive audience engagement. However, creating interesting content is all well and good, but what do you do with it once you have it ready to go?
We can offer a Social Media Strategy – a bespoke approach that will maximise the impact of your content once it is published.
We can also offer Social Media Management – executing your strategy according to a planned schedule and targets.
As you can see, the possibilities of academic collaboration with Preston Street Films are limitless and and we’re keen to work with academics in all sorts of ways to tap into the incredible expertise and stories that universities hold.
Do have a look around the website and get in touch to see how we can work together.