Hollowell

Hollowell has been casting iron cookware in the same building since 1928. Four generations on, the pans had found a new audience — people who discovered them in restaurant kitchens and by word of mouth — but the company still presented itself like a trade supplier. A catalogue, a price list, a phone number.

They didn't want a rebrand. They wanted people to see what actually happens inside the foundry: the heat, the noise, the number of hands each pan passes through. The brief was a film that could carry the company's story without a single line of marketing copy.

V. set one rule for the shoot: nothing staged. We filmed for four days on the foundry floor, working around a live production schedule. Mike shot on a single prime lens with available light wherever the furnace allowed it — the pour is the brightest thing in the building, and the grade was built outward from that orange.

There is no voiceover. Ted recorded the foundry as an instrument — the furnace, the sand moulds, the grinding wheels — and built the score from those recordings, so the film sounds like the place it was made in. Alex cut the piece to the journey of a single pan through the building, start to finish, in four minutes.

Alongside the film, Robbie photographed the full range in the studio: black iron on black, lit from a single source, so the product imagery and the film belong to the same world.

Ava planned what happened to the film once it was finished: a ninety-second cut, then a run of short pieces for social, each one a single process — the pour, the grind, the seasoning — so that the foundry's feed became a slow tour of the building rather than a string of adverts.

The film launched on Hollowell's site, with a ninety-second cut running across social. It was selected for two craft and documentary short programmes, and picked up by food and design publications without a press push.

Hollowell sold through its seasonal production run in eleven days; the year before, it had taken four months. The still life series now carries the entire range online, and the foundry recordings have become the brand's sound across everything it has released since.