Animation

DS Smith: telling the circular story through motion

Animated explainer · Circular economy

Client

DS Smith

Services

Animation

Year

2025

Outcome

A film that explains DS Smith's circular packaging strategy on silent loops or with voiceover.

DS Smith needed a short film that could explain their circular packaging strategy to high-level audiences, and could do it on a loop at an industry event with the sound off. We built it with Hammerspace Video.

The outcome

A short film that articulates DS Smith's circular economy strategy for stakeholder audiences, designed to work in two completely different viewing contexts:

Looping silently on large screens at awards shows, conferences and exhibition stands
Playing with voiceover in boardrooms, investor briefings and corporate presentations

The film now anchors DS Smith's sustainability storytelling across both. One asset, two registers, same message.

The challenge

DS Smith is a global packaging business operating in over 30 countries, with circularity at the centre of how the company positions itself. The brief was a film that communicated that strategy with the visual confidence the audience expected, that worked at the scale and pace of an industry event, and that didn't depend on sound to land.

It had to work with or without sound.

That single constraint shaped every decision that followed. Pacing, visual emphasis, the relationship between footage and motion, the role of typography. All of it had to carry the narrative independently, then enhance the voiceover when it was present.

Our approach

We partnered with Hammerspace Video on the project from the start. Hammerspace co-developed the storyboard with us, led the live-action production capturing real-world packaging operations and circular processes, and handled the edit. We focused on the motion layer wrapped around the footage, building visual grammar that could carry the story in silence.

Key creative decisions:

A motion layer designed to lead. Animations that follow the live-action, reinforce DS Smith's circularity model and supply the semantic weight when there's no voiceover.
In-frame typography that does the talking. Phrases like "we are doing away with waste and pollution" appear as part of the composition, not as captions tacked on top.
A loop point built into the edit. The film returns cleanly to its opening without a hard cut, so it can run unattended on a booth screen and still look intentional.
A consistent visual language across animation and live-action. Same colour and type system throughout, so the film reads as a single piece rather than two stitched together.

Voiceover by Ritchie Clarke. Calm and authoritative, paced so the visuals stay in charge.

What it does for DS Smith

The film is what DS Smith uses when they need to put their sustainability strategy in front of a stakeholder audience and let it speak for itself. At silent venues it stops people walking past. In voiced presentations it sets the tone the rest of the deck builds on. It moves the circular story from a slide in a corporate deck into a piece of communication the company can lead with.