Charity & Environmental
Video Production
Documentaries, campaign films and fundraising content for charities, NGOs and conservation organisations. Our films have helped raise £1.6m, and won at festivals along the way.
UK Wide
Production Services
£1.9m
Raised by our charity films
50+
5-star Google reviews
500+
Films Produced
Wildfire recovery in Portugal. Peatland regeneration in the South West. Trees seeded by drone. Stories worth more than a simple donate button.
Here Now Films is a UK video production company, headquartered in London, that makes documentaries and campaign films for charities and environmental organisations — including The Living Layer for the South West Peatland Partnership, Bio Estrela (CINEECO Best Landscape), drone-seeding work for the Woodland Trust, and films for Buglife, the Wildlife Trusts and Somerset Local Nature Partnership. Our charity films have helped raise £1.6m.
Charity video usually fails in one of two ways: it manipulates, or it bores. The fix is the same as it is everywhere, treat the people in the film as the story, not the appeal. The organisations below trusted us with subjects that matter; the films earned attention because they’re worth watching, and the fundraising followed.
THE WORK
Recent charity productions
South West Peatland Partnership · Documentary · Festival selected
The Living Layer: Restoring the UK’s lost peatlands
A story of landscape regeneration: the peatlands of the South West, the people restoring them, and why a bog is one of the most important carbon stores in Britain. Selected for festivals — winning Edinburgh conservation film festival. This film is used as the central piece of storytelling, and a main fundraising tool, for the South West Peatland Partnership, a coalition of over forty different charitable organisation working together to restore peatland on a landscape scale.
Bio Estrela Project · Documentary · CINEECO Best Landscape
Bio Estrela: The fight against Portugals wildfires.
As wildfires swept the Estrela mountains in Portugal, local conservationists fought back with native, fire-resistant tree planting. Our documentary followed them, and took Best Landscape at CINEECO, the environmental film festival.
Made with donated time. We put around ten per cent of the studio into projects we believe in; this was one of them.
Woodland Trust · Conservation film · UK
Sky Seeding: Reforesting the Cornish rainforest using drones.
Our first film with the Woodland Trust followed drone seeding, reforestation at a scale hands can’t match, filmed at the altitude the story happens at. The kind of environmental brief we build crews for.
Tate Galleries · Arts & Heritage film · Four Productions & Counting
Tate Galleries: 4 years, 4 charity documentaries.
Some of Britain’s best-loved institutions are charities — Tate among them. Our ongoing artist-profile partnership with Tate Galleries, including the Barbara Hepworth film, is work commissioned by a charitable organisation and made to a charitable mission: art for everyone.
The partnership lives in full on our arts & heritage video production page — one client, one home, cross-referenced here because charity commissioners deserve to know the company they’d keep.
Heligan · Documentary · Regenerative farming
The regenerative farm
A documentary about how Heligan farms — soil, stock and the long view — fronted by Jimmy Doherty. Environmental storytelling for an institution whose brand work also lives on our lifestyle & retail video production page.
“I worked with a crew of four from Here Now Films for a pilot project… we met for the first time on the day with a hazy plan for a tricky shoot, and the crew took it all in their step. The final product was great.”
Sam Manning — Woodland Trust
BEFORE YOU BRIEF
How to commission charity and environment video well
Our charity films have helped raise £1.6m, and the ones that worked hardest shared three commissioning decisions, made before the camera came out.
Choose a story, not a summary
The strongest charity films follow one case, one place, one person: a single investigation of peatland in The Living Layer, one community replanting after fire in Bio Estrela. Films that try to summarise the whole organisation end up as annual reports with music. Pick the story that proves the mission and let it stand for everything else.
Protect the dignity of the people in the film
Contributors to charity films are often at the sharpest point of the issue. How they’re filmed is a commissioning decision: informed consent, questions that let people explain rather than perform, and an edit that never trades someone’s hardest moment for a fundraising beat. It also happens to make better films — audiences trust what doesn’t feel extracted.
Plan the film’s working life before the shoot
A fundraising film that lives only at the gala has one night to earn its budget. The ones behind our £1.6m worked for years — cut for appeals, socials, grant applications and press. Commission the versions up front; retrofitting them later costs more and works worse.
FORMATS
What we produce charities
Fundraising films
The films that sit at the centre of an appeal. Ours have helped raise £1.6m — including £1.9M from a single film in another sector.
Impact documentaries
The Living Layer and Bio Estrela model: real conservation work, filmed with festival-grade craft.
Campaign films
Awareness and behaviour-change content built to travel — cut for social, screens and press.
Supporter & volunteer stories
Documentary profiles that show the humans behind the mission — dignity first, sentimentality never.
Event films
From the Chelsea Flower Show to community projects: the moment, captured so it keeps working after the marquee comes down.
Corporate partnership films
Where a brand backs a cause — like AimHi Earth’s work with PepsiCo — we film the substance, not the logo lockup. See brand video production.
WHERE WE WORK
Charity films,
UK-Wide & Beyond
Conservation doesn’t happen in studios. This work has taken us to the peatlands of the South West, the Estrela mountains of Portugal, Woodland Trust sites filmed from drone altitude, and Cornwall’s fishing harbours for the Wildlife Trusts. We’re headquartered in London with crews in Manchester, Bristol and Cornwall — which, for environmental briefs, means the crew is often already near the landscape.
London-based charity or NGO? check out our London page.
PRICING
The Honest Range
Single film
From £9K
Same tiers we publish everywhere. Charities and special projects: we’ve worked for much, much less, and donate roughly ten per cent of our time to causes we believe in. Ask.
Documentary / brand film
From £16K
Multi-day production. Full creative development, cinematography, colour grade.
Campaign / retainer
From £50K/yr
Multi-film programme across a year of campaigns. Dedicated production partner.
FAQ
Questions charity commissioners ask us
From £9,000 for a single film, from £16,000 for a documentary or brand film, and from £80,000 per year for a multi-film campaign retainer. For charities and special projects we’ve worked for much less, and we donate around ten per cent of studio time to causes we believe in — worth asking about.
Ours have helped raise £1.6m across charity productions, and one fundraising film in another sector raised £1.9M on its own. A film doesn’t replace a fundraising strategy — it gives the strategy something people actually want to share.
Yes. We’ve filmed peatland restoration for the South West Peatland Partnership, post-wildfire replanting in Portugal’s Estrela mountains, drone seeding for the Woodland Trust, and Cornwall’s fishing industry for the Wildlife Trusts. Small crews, long lenses, and respect for the environment we’re in.
A single fundraising film or supporter story typically runs four to eight weeks from kickoff to delivery. Documentaries built around seasons or fieldwork — like peatland restoration — run to the landscape’s calendar, not ours, and we plan them that way from the start.
Yes, if it’s planned before the shoot rather than after. We build the appeal film, social cuts, grant-application version and press assets into the shooting plan, so one production day funds a year of channels — the approach behind the films that raised £1.6m.
You bring the audience and the problem — recruitment, occupancy, credibility — and we return a treatment, a budget and a schedule, with the consent and compliance steps already mapped. No charge; it’s how the KYN partnership began.
Headquartered at 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, with crews in Manchester, Bristol and Cornwall. We shoot across the UK and internationally.
Other Sectors we specialise in
Brand launch films, global campaigns, customer stories and fireside chats for Miro,
Beyond, Cohere, Qualcomm and the Bank for International Settlements.
Brand films, investor communications and fireside chats for wealth managers and financial
institutions. Six productions for AlTi Tiedemann Global, one premiered at Davos.
Documentaries, campaign and fundraising films for charities and conservation organisations,
from The Living Layer to the Woodland Trust’s drone seeding.
Brand films, campaigns and TV commercials for the brands people live with. Seven campaigns
for FatFace, Whistlefish’s first TV ad, Plankbridge, Heligan, Belvoir.
Story-led films for care providers, pharmaceutical brands and medical device companies.
Forty-plus films across a three-year partnership with KYN.
Artist profiles, exhibition and heritage documentaries for galleries and cultural institutions. Four
productions for Tate; the film that opened the Sony World Photography Awards 2026.
Heritage, site and recruitment films for construction, engineering and manufacturing firms. One
hundred years of JA Brooks, from the Blitz to live London sites.
Adventure documentaries, brand films and stunt films for sport and outdoor brands. The Turner
Twins’ electric paramotor record with Panasonic; Domino’s at Glastonbury.
Let’s talk about your charity film!
Drop us a line, a brief or even a note on when works for a call. We’d love to chat.