LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
Making research engagement visible - and impossible to ignore
Lancaster University worked with Skylark on a mixed media animation for university research engagement. The University has been a force for good since its foundation in 1964. Today, engagement sits at the heart of its Strategic Plan – connecting research, teaching and communities to transform wider society.
The Problem
But communicating that to an internal audience is harder than it sounds. Academics and researchers are busy. Engagement can feel abstract, as it’s often something for someone else to worry about. Lancaster needed a film that could change that perception quickly and make engagement feel relevant, supported and achievable.
Moreover, the film had to work for multiple audiences at once: researchers, university staff and members of the public. It also needed to launch an entirely new portal, giving people a reason to explore it further.
Our approach to mixed media animation for university research engagement
The brief ruled out figurative characters. So Skylark developed an abstract graphic approach, building a visual language from Lancaster University’s own brand colours, typography and shapes.
Rather than illustrating engagement with people and places, the animation uses motion and form to show connection, flow and exchange. Concepts like knowledge transfer, civic partnership and policy influence become tangible through abstract composition, without oversimplifying them. Furthermore, the pacing was deliberately unhurried. The audience is academic, so the film treats them accordingly.
Five types of engagement, one coherent visual world
The script covers five engagement types: Business, Civic, Public and Community, Policy, and Media. Each needed to feel distinct. At the same time, each needed to feel part of the same connected system.
Skylark structured the animation to move between these areas fluidly – using the brand’s visual toolkit to signal each shift without hard breaks. A professional voiceover artist anchored the content, keeping it authoritative but accessible. As a result, the film works equally well for a researcher watching it for the first time and a member of the public exploring the portal.
Built for the portal and beyond
Skylark also produced a series of graphic assets – shapes and colour treatments drawn from the animation – for use as graphical assets elsewhere on the Engagement portal. Additionally, shorter cuts were created for social media distribution, giving Lancaster flexible content across multiple channels from a single production.
The animation launched as the hero film for Lancaster University’s Engagement Learning and Development Portal. It gives the university a professional, brand-consistent resource to help academics and researchers engage – from the moment they land on the page.
