The 2025 UK Top 50: digging into Moving Image’s annual ranking of comms film movers and shakers

Online video being today’s key moving image form, creatively crafted film is an indispensable communications tool for companies, public bodies and not-for-profits. So comms filmmaking, traditionally termed ‘corporate film’ (though not all practitioners like its 1980s connotations), furnishes one of the digital mediasphere’s busiest corners.

Hence the sector’s 2025 UK Top 50, launched last week by industry analysts Moving Image in association with trade organisation EVCOM, makes essential reading. This annual league table ranking production companies and agencies working the comms film field is an engrossing state-of-the-nation snapshot, crunching data on company revenue, peer recognition, awards garnered and volume of projects delivered to produce the top of the pops.

Top producer, as last year, is Casual Films, whom we first tipped as one-to-watch back in 2012. Then a promising small business, they’re now thriving multinational video producers and consultant-strategists, with offices in nine cities worldwide. Not particularly focused on awards entries, they hit the top spot thanks to profitability, productivity and massive peer respect.

At numbers 2 and 3 sit two much longer-established competitors: DRPG, who operate across both film production and live events sectors, and film-focused The Edge Picture Company. Founded in 1980 and 1991 respectively, both are highly visible at awards ceremonies.   

2024’s New York Festivals awarded DRPG editing gold for The Whole You, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) film for Canon which previously collected the editing award in London at 2023’s EVCOM Screen Awards. The Edge meanwhile took an NY award for an HSBC project marking World Mental Health Day. Having for many years won New York’s production company of the year, this time, reflecting that festival’s TV/corporates crossover, the accolade went to Zinc Media, now parent company for both The Edge and TV producers including Brook Lapping (themselves winning several awards in broadcast-focused NY categories).

The Edge’s 2024 EVCOM awards illustrate their strengths: stylistically versatile but especially noted for their short-form dramas with a cinematic aesthetic particularly suiting, among other things, health and safety messaging. A Day to Remember, for UK Power Networks, won EVCOM’s health and safety category. Senior creative Louisa van den Berg describes this as a “hard-hitting film [driving] home how important it is to learn from past mistakes, combining real failures from several incidents into one story… to make colleagues ask themselves: Why, after all those ruined lives, do we still keep bending the rules?”

Blending drama and documentary, Not Worth It, for high-volume comms-film customer (and frequent Edge client) Network Rail, took EVCOM’s coveted best direction prize. “Following a near-miss incident at a level crossing, we were asked for a powerful awareness film,” says creative director Nick Canner. “Key people involved took part: having everyone speak about their experience [caused] a phenomenal audience response, young people feeling moved to talk about their own attitudes and behaviours – and change them.” 

Plastic Pictures, jumping three positions from last year, hits number 4. A production agency who like Casual have risen momentously in recent years, significantly they came second to them in the peer poll while topping the rankings for awards won, recognising their work’s artistic quality and human impact. Last year’s most awarded UK comms film was Plastic’s History of Technology, grabbing two gongs at the Cannes Dolphins (corporate’s answer to advertising’s Cannes Lions), three category prizes at EVCOM and EVCOM’s Grand Prix for 2024’s best film. 

This peppy video takes a stylishly fast-moving, friendly approach to informative documentary-making. Creative director Samantha Gunn reflects: “HSBC has a legacy of embracing cutting edge technology, from telegrams to blockchain and biometrics…. [telling] this story of relentless customer-focused innovation we created a thumb-stopping film with a look we characterised as ‘Wes Anderson through the ages’”. By topping both brand communication and internal comms categories, this project demonstrates how identical content can reach different audiences on different platforms simultaneously, with impressive metrics.

Plastic also took EVCOM’s script award, for a well-written – and sharply edited – Persil social video project. “A great manifesto film,” says Gunn.

At number 5, RD Content can be characterised as a creative production agency with film at the heart of their offer. Against stiff international competition they were named Cannes’ production company of the year, on top of taking four gold awards including one for environmental issues and sustainability – and another for best use of drones!

At number 6 we find Mediazoo. Like Plastic, they’ve moved from up-and-comer to big leaguer within a few short years, and took EVCOM’s newly initiated prize for best agency culture: as in other screen sectors, the wellbeing of employees and freelancers is an increasingly important industry-wide concern. They also nabbed EVCOM prizes for a Lloyds Banking Group DEI project. 

DEI has been a (not uncontroversial) major theme of the corporate world for some years, yielding a PhD thesis’s worth of films produced for multiple clients by multiple producers. This is recognised by EVCOM having a dedicated annual award for best films in the category (like safety films, they’re often imaginative but produced for internal use only: a factor in the sector not garnering quite the recognition it deserves). 

The smart technique of Mediazoo’s In Confidence, part of film-led learning experience Inclusive for Customers, also recognised at Cannes, is to ask Lloyd’s senior leaders, filmed in a starkly-lit studio, to read out and react in real time to feedback, positive and negative, from customers, often from marginalised groups: a powerful way of embedding others’ lived experience into staff thinking (all employees were required to view the series). Exec producer Matt Pothecary says: “Our approach was to create a film requiring bravery, illicit emotion… getting [viewers] to reflect on their own experiences and communicating a clear call to action. Our client team totally understood this approach.”

Further varied models populate lower Top 10 rankings. At number 8 comes Radley Yeldar, one of the first design agencies to have integrated film into their services, followed by Brunswick Creative, the most successful comms consultancy to have done similar. At number 10 is wtv: formerly World Television, and founded in 1991, like DRP and Plastic they work across both video and events production, with a livestreams specialism.

The most auspicious chart placing is… Auspicious Group, amazingly a new entry at number 7 only six months after opening their doors. This film, digital and PR agency is headed by Mediazoo founder Rachel Pendered with Barnaby Cook, co-founder of Casual: a bit of a superhero teamup. They proudly bill themselves as “a majority female-owned business”.

A large, growing number of women-led companies is an industry trend, as is growing experimentation with AI, greater visibility of production outside London (especially in the Midlands) and the willingness of some producers to embrace controversial social issues. Some of these shifts become apparent as we look further down the rankings, where there’s a significant geographical spread. 

This spans from Brighton-based We Are Tilt, who came in at number 18 (but were number 2 in terms of awards won), to Loughborough’s Affixxius, who report having broken into the lucrative client sectors of fashion and cars, to comedy and animation specialists Studio Giggle, who recently launched a specialist virtual production space in their hometown Bristol. Then there’s the range of specialisms evident whether training drama supremos Pukka Films, socially conscious Brickwall, and health film auteurs Inner Eye Productions.

Consider Taylor Made Media, founded in 2010, coming in at number 16 and, strikingly, number 4 in Moving Image’s ‘peer poll’. Social media campaigns are integral to today’s comms film landscape, a film or series often forming one segment within a bigger content strategy. For instance, agency founder and head Sophie Taylor recalls: “Macmillan Cancer Support tasked us with creating relatable social films addressing common questions people face when impacted by cancer.” 

Campaign films are often devised to play across multiple platforms for particularly concise messaging: in the case of Taylor’s EVCOM-winning Macmillan series Whatever You Need to Ask running under a minute. Deceptively simple and emotionally engaging it connected with audiences and achieved its goal, driving a 36% increase in calls to the commissioning charity.

Taylor Made’s other EVCOM award was for the editing of their visually bold dynamic Uncommon Thinking commissioned by architects RSHP, known for iconic buildings like Lloyds of London and the Pompidou Centre. Interpreting a broad brief (to make a film reminding internal audiences and external clients and stakeholders of their values), Taylor reports: “RSHP’s approach, blending practicality, sustainability and bold design, starts with ‘uncommon thinking’. [We devised] a 90-second film capturing this ethos, showcasing their people, process and social impact, avoiding talking heads, we symbolised project evolution: from sketches to CAD [computer-aided design], to final design”. The edit successfully evokes a colourful, confident energy celebrating the curious mind that RSHP seeks to attract.

Or consider number 17: Big Button. A force for good is how the work of the Howden Group is expressed in EVCOM’s best documentary winner. Big Button (who characterise themselves as a “strategy-first video agency”) won this accolade for Harry and the FSO Safer where we see the insurance team’s collaborative work with the United Nations to prevent a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe (a disintegrating super tanker threatening the Red Sea). 

Filming in Fowey, Cornwall, the challenge for Big Button, according to client services director Simon Crofts, was “to differentiate… from typical financial employer brand videos while working within a tight budget, [the documentary approach] resonated with potential employees and aligned with Howden’s brand values: Force for good, No limits, Collective power, and People first”. This polished piece succeeds not just due to strong visuals but also resonance, because the social and environmental concerns feel at the heart of it.

At number 20, we encounter digital content agency NRG Studios whose EVCOM best animation award illustrates blurry boundaries between comms film and advertising and, again, the integration of film into multimedia campaigns. The super-short, super-stylish RADARX, a promo for a (humane, you’ll be glad to hear) mouse control product brought together external and internal creative teams. “We worked with Rentokil’s team to create a visually striking piece that would resonate with audiences worldwide,” says NRG creative director Robert Edmonds. “[This] collaboration ensured the film aligned seamlessly with the wider RADARX campaign aesthetic. By combining high gloss environments, cinematic lighting, a powerful soundtrack, and designed sound effects, the 3D animated film elevated the product to a new level.”  Animation has always been particularly useful in reaching multinational, multilingual audiences: this one’s been translated into 25 languages.

Coming in at number 27, Nowadays, which “champions socially conscious storytelling across brand films, commercials, and music videos”, were only number 37 last year, their 2025 ranking no doubt boosted by taking the 2024 Cannes Dolphins prize for worldwide best film. That film was Waiting List, covering the subject of trans people investigating medical transition, a project developed, pro bono, by Nowadays with the charity Gendered Intelligence, and directed by Phoebe Brooks. Brooks’ film cleverly starts out by appearing to be in one genre of comms (a cheery public information film) before revealing itself as another (a more dismaying, campaigning awareness-raiser showing how poorly served the UK trans community is for transition provision).

One last entry worth drawing attention to is number 39. This is Inspired Films, who won an EVCOM gold for Emmy’s Story. Be inspired by the vulnerable, poignant opening reflections of Emmy’s mum, who has witnessed how the little-known Vici syndrome has affected her daughter’s life. In this case, Action Medical Research had commissioned Inspired to generate increased traffic and more conversation about the life-limiting genetic disorder with no current cure. The film successfully shows how the illness profoundly affects Emmy and her family, while offering hope around the ongoing funding towards medical breakthroughs.

Inspired’s creative co-founder, Louis Paltnoi, recalls aiming for a “raw, unflinchingly honest and emotive snapshot into the struggle of a family living with Vici Syndrome. The success and impact… was due to a combination of authentic storytelling and a symbiotic partnership between the filmmakers and the contributors.” The result is very moving.