After two years of shoots spanning the globe — from Switzerland to India to Japan — capturing genuinely incredible stories, and countless hours banging our heads in the edit bay, our new showreel is finally complete.This time around, we were determined to show Hidden Woods in a brand new light. So we stuck to a few guiding principles.
1. Why we stopped trying to make it short.
Flashy cuts and a barrage of SFX are so 2015. We're tired of the assumption that nobody can focus for more than 30 seconds, and if we were serious about making a truly great reel, we knew chasing a 60–90 second runtime was beside the point. So instead of chasing brevity, we focused on mood-building and moment-making.
2. We built the reel around one theme: Hope.
We chose hope, because it's become a natural throughline across all of our projects, and we wanted the reel to feel stylistically harmonious as a result. This was a chance to demonstrate depth, not breadth. As we've matured as a company, we've become less interested in proving to clients that we can "do it all," and more interested in showing them what we do really well.
3. Any story worth its salt has an arc.
You can't have hope without despair, relief without pain, or achievement without setback. To give this reel a true climax, one that gives you goosebumps, we knew we couldn't shy away from showing both the light and the dark.
4. Why we made it feel like a movie trailer.
Because why wouldn’t we? Trailers are the one format that has always known how to make you feel something in just a couple of minutes: a quiet open, a slow build, a swell of music, and a final hit that sends you out the door buzzing. That’s the shape we wanted for the reel.
A little hope, right now.
Today, it's easy to feel apathetic and hopeless about the state of the world. We know this reel won't fix that. But it's our honest attempt at reminding ourselves that hope is always alive, and that our power to share it with one another is a gift that should never be forgotten.
With love,
Aidan & Dave
