The antidote to short-form content

25/08/2026

Having recently completed After the Smoke Clears, a documentary about the devastating wildfires in the Goyt Valley last year, I have found that the film raises a significant point of interest. On paper, as a 16 minute doc, it shouldn’t have proved this popular, but the view count speaks for itself – 170,000 at the time of writing this.

The Goyt Valley is loved by many. An area for walking, cycling and sailing, it also forms a key natural habitat for rare red-listed birds and holds a huge carbon store in the form of peat. A huge amount of work had just been completed to repair the damage to the Moor, leaving it exposed to erosion and habitat loss. 

At the time of the fire, this quite small valley in the middle of the Peak District became national news, stirring genuine emotion among locals personally affected by it. And at the time, there was a huge amount of awareness raised about the risk of wildfires in this country.

As the one-year anniversary of the fire’s start approached, I was contacted by Moors for the Future with the aim of bringing the memories of the fire back into people’s minds with the view of making a film that could be presented at the one-year anniversary. A few days after the fire, we were asked by a separate client to go and capture the devastation, the valley now completely charred. But there was never really a plan for how to use this captured footage.  So when Moors for Future came to us and said, “we want to make some sort of film,” it felt like it was meant to be. 

That’s where it all started.

So why have I written this insight piece? As a production company, as a sector, and for all comms teams across our clients, we need to be a bit braver. 

There has to be more trust and respect for our audiences; the confidence that they will want to invest up to 15 minutes of their time, despite the overwhelming trend of short form.

Our client asked not to make a typical corporate film that needs to fit under five minutes and easily be extracted for socials. They knew this sort of content has its place, but since they have a lot of this already, they wanted something different.

There are also lots of videos and snappy posts saying “do not have barbecues on the moors, do not do this, do not do that,” but ultimately, viewers aren’t always receptive to being told what not to do. Our objective was to inform through story and interest, not through instruction. 

Immediately, we were working without the usual shackles of a typical commission.
And we began to think:

How could we make a film that could be screened at festivals?
How can we make viewers care about moorland through people?
What would make the audience fall in love with the place?

I was lucky that our client was brave enough to see the opportunity. Clients Emma and Megan agreed to make a film as long as it needed to be (the original cut was 21 minutes, and the final edit was 16 and a half minutes).

Having local contributors telling their story is crucial to the film’s success. We hear the voices of the contributors only after 10 minutes into the film, and we only see their faces in the final 2 minutes. As I said at the beginning, this goes against all current comms thinking and expectation.

But by God, has it restored faith in the industry and the medium I have dedicated 25 years to. So much of the industry is depressed, being told audiences can only consume 15 seconds, and that video must be filmed in portrait form, with shite graphics, or worse – something that ChatGPT has come out with.

It was a risk, and Fuzzy Duck pushed the envelope on what we could achieve. But within a month our clients, and more importantly, the community, were very happy.

At the time of writing, the film has achieved 170,000 views with a very small subscriber base. It has made me totally rethink some of my own professional practice. 

And ultimately, I think it leads to two things. A longer viewing period helps embed that message in the viewer. Secondly, it’s a really good return on an investment. This 16-minute film has an average watch time of 8 minutes. It was a £15,000 budget. Divide that by the number of views; that’s 1.5 pence per view, one month after it was released. That sort of investment return… you’d struggle if you made £15,000 through short social media with fewer stories.

Having faith in the viewer is something I think we all have, but we’ve started to second-guess ourselves in recent years; we’ve become driven first by data, then by intuition. This project has confirmed to me that it’s not about a film’s run-time, it’s about what’s in it that matters. 

Yeah. Okay, cool. That’s enough.

Nigel
Production Director