Renold Couplings: 75 years in Cardiff, told through the company's own archive

Renold Couplings asked us to mark 75 years in Cardiff with a film that actually earned the word heritage. So we went back to the company's own archive, real adverts, real photographs, a company history written by its own historian, and built the story out of that.

The outcome

A two and a half minute storytelling film running from Hans Renold founding the company in 1879 through to the 85 people making couplings in Cardiff and across Europe today. Built for three audiences at once: a 75th anniversary celebration, ongoing use on LinkedIn and in customer mailings, and material for inducting new starters, so it had to work as heritage film, sales tool and internal culture piece simultaneously.

The challenge

Renold Couplings sells highly specified engineering couplings and clutches, protecting expensive equipment for shipbuilders, generator manufacturers and steelworks, to engineers who care about precision, not sentiment. The brief asked for something serious with a little playfulness in it, and a real result: employees proud of where they work, prospective employees keen to join, customers glad to be dealing with a company that has been doing this since 1879.

143 years of company history is a lot to compress into two and a half minutes without it turning into a list of dates. Founders, patents given away for free, world wars, four acquisitions, three legal name changes, a factory move to Cardiff that took three years to complete. The film had to hold all of that and still feel like one story.

Our approach

Real research, not a brand deck. Renold commissioned its own company historian decades ago, two proper published histories covering 1879 to 1967. We worked from those books for the chronology: Hans Renold's 1880 bush roller chain patent, the 1896 move to a 48 hour working week when the norm was 52 or more, the Hans Renold Social Union he set up for his workers. Facts, not folklore.

Built from the actual archive, not illustrated from scratch. Renold's own archive held genuine period adverts running from 1899 to the early 1960s, real press ads, postcards, posters. We animated those originals directly: camera moves across the real 1899 Block Chain ad, smoke drifting over the hand drawn illustration on the cover of the actual 1949 Cardiff factory opening programme. The heritage on screen is the real heritage, not a recreation of it.

Ours is all fact and no fiction.

A line from a genuine 1907 Renold advert, and a fair description of the approach we took to the whole film.

The past hands off to the present, on screen. Archive photography and real footage of today's Cardiff factory floor sit in the same film, so the story doesn't stop at a sepia photo. It ends with the actual team working today, real machines, real people, not actors or stock footage.

The people are the point. The film closes on real staff photographs, each one tagged with a milestone year from the company's history, tying 143 years of dates directly to the actual people at the Cardiff site today rather than leaving the history feeling like something that happened to someone else.

What it does for Renold Couplings

One film doing three jobs: a genuine 75th anniversary centrepiece, an ongoing piece of content for LinkedIn and customer mailings that says more about the company's staying power than a spec sheet ever could, and an induction film that gives every new starter the real story of where they've just joined, rather than a slide deck.

Credits

• Client: Renold Couplings
• Studio: Alchemy