Recharge in Nature

What it was

Recharge in Nature is BMW UK's three-year partnership with National Parks UK: charging for electric cars at key locations across the fifteen National Parks, and a fund for nature restoration, biodiversity, sustainability and wellbeing projects in them. The films sit under BMW's campaign line The Joy of Slow, and their creative platform was Big Little Things: the small, tangible things the funding does in a park, a hedgerow, a dew pond, a charging point, and the bigger change each one leads to, told by the people who do the work.

One film for each of two parks. At Dartmoor the film follows a community engagement ranger and a group of children into the woods with a seedling in their hands, and finds the wood ants under their feet. At Eryri it opens on the glutinous snail, now found only in Llyn Tegid, and goes to the lake with the park's senior ecologist, into the hedgerows being planted and the tree nursery growing the stock. Each long film was delivered with cut-downs of 30, 20 and 6 seconds, in landscape, square and vertical, and the Eryri set in Welsh as well as English.

Technical approach

Vision3 produced and directed the films for Media.Monks, with Chris Parks directing and Adam May producing. Rob Hollingworth was director of photography, and Tim Cockerill handled the animals. The macro natural-history photography is the Vision3 craft in the campaign: the snail on the stone, the ant on the moss, the water on a leaf, magnified until the small thing at the centre of each project is the biggest thing on the screen. The shoot ran with Sustainable Film as its sustainability consultancy.