Client: Cohere – Genre: Brand Campaign – Format: 35mm
AI for Empowerment: Cohere’s brand campaign, shot on 35mm across four countries
An enterprise AI company asked for a campaign that looked and felt nothing like AI marketing. We shot it on 35mm motion picture film in Canada, Norway, Cornwall and Portugal: four documentary styled, observational vignettes, a two-minute hero film, a ten-minute cinema piece for Berlin, and roughly 190 finished assets, all from a single campaign.
The hero
The combined edit
All four subjects in one two-minute film. What began as a 30-second piece, meant as a social from the rest of the campaign, grew into a standalone flagship film as the campaign’s ambition grew. There’s no voiceover: it runs on soundscape, an original score by Rowan Perkins, and the on-screen prompts alone. Watch it with the sound on.
The brief
An AI company that wanted
to look nothing like AI
Cohere came to us in February 2026, through this website, looking for a brand campaign that looked and felt nothing like AI marketing. No product UI, no glowing interfaces. The brief that emerged had one rule above all others, and it never moved.
“No technology on screen. No
phones, no laptops, no devices.”
The campaign rule
Cohere’s presence would be carried by a cinematic text treatment alone. What the films show instead is four people, filmed calmly and closely, doing the things their work usually crowds out: a founder making maple syrup they way he used to with his grandad, a chess champion reading in a park, a designer on a cliff path, a creative director in the sea. The proposition underneath it all: Cohere gives people back their time, and what they do with that time is the interesting bit.
The campaign launched on 8 September 2026 and is running now across YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, connected TV and programmatic out-of-home in the US, UK, Canada and Germany, and on cohere.com.
The format
Why we shot on 35mm
An AI company choosing the most analogue, most human format available says something about how they see their product. That was the argument, and Cohere backed it.
The campaign was shot on 35mm motion picture film, Kodak Vision3 through an Arricam LT, with 16mm as texture and behind-the-scenes coverage on digital. Film is a discipline as much as a look. A 400ft roll of 35mm runs about three and a half minutes, so nothing gets shot loosely: every set-up is boarded, every zoom rehearsed, every roll accounted for. There’s no coverage safety net to lean on in the edit, and we like to think you can see that discipline in the finished films.
Hands up… this was also our first 35mm campaign. We were in safe hands though: Charlie Coombes directing, Spike Morris (A DOP who is well versed in all things 35mm) shooting all four legs, processing and 4K scanning at Cinelab in Slough, and the grade at Harbor in Farringdon. Nine reels of original camera negative came back across the campaign. Every one of them made it home, though one of them took the scenic route. More on that below.
The films
Four films, four countries,
one continuous team.
The series shares one grammar: a single slow zoom-out per film, starting tight on a face and ending in a landscape. No dialogue. Music sitting under the location sound, never leading it. Each film runs around 50 seconds and was delivered in eleven channel versions, from :50 heroes to :15 cutdowns.
Film 01 · Aidan
Aidan Gomez, in an Ontario maple wood
Ontario, Canada · Shot 17 April 2026
Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s co-founder and CEO, taps and boils maple syrup on his family’s land in Ontario. We hired a local first AD in Ontario rather than flying one out, and when the sap season turned early, bulk sap was sourced so the boiling could be shot for real. The film ends fireside, at sunset.
Aidan’s note on the first cut changed the whole campaign. That story has its own section further down.
Film 02 · Magnus
Magnus Carlsen, in Oslo.
Oslo, Norway · Shot 9 May 2026
Magnus Carlsen, World Chess Champion and Cohere brand ambassador, walks and reads in central Oslo. Deliberately not a chess film. A Norwegian crew of around thirty through Einar Film, 30 extras. Spike, DOP, shot part of it standing in the water in waders. We have photos to prove it.
Then there was the small hitch that the negative couldn’t fly home. The airline refused hand-carriage, X-ray screening would have destroyed the exposed film, and the airport operator confirmed in writing that there was no exemption. So the negative stayed put while we worked the problem: it was processed and scanned locally in Oslo, and the film itself came home days later by controlled courier. Nothing was lost.
Film 03 · Serena
Serena Li, on the Lizard
The Lizard, Cornwall · Shot 16 June 2026
Serena Li, a Toronto-based designer, hikes the coast path and cycles above the sea on the Lizard peninsula, in our home county. The route crosses three separate land ownerships, so we pulled three separate film permits for what is effectively one sequence: National Trust for the Kynance Cove clifftops, Natural England for the Lizard National Nature Reserve, and the Trelowarren Estate for the cycling road.
The clifftops sit on a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which rewrites how a unit works. No drones. No generators, so the shoot ran on portable power stations. No breaking ground, so every gazebo was weighted. Water-only fire response on wild heathland, kit carried in on beach carts, and no phone signal anywhere, so the unit ran on twelve walkie-talkies. The cycling moved to a private estate road, and a precision tracking vehicle came down from Bristol for the moving shots.
Two weeks of glorious forecasts collapsed into fog the night before. We put the options to the client in writing and pushed on: call moved up to 07:00 to catch the mist, and the unit wrapped fourteen hours later with an atmosphere none of the other locations have. Charlie’s grading note for Cornwall reads, in full: “It was a misty day.”
Film 04 · Jonas
Jonas Niedermüller, surfing at sunset.
Ericeira, Portugal · Shot 16 July 2026
Jonas Niedermüller, a creative director based between London, Berlin and Portugal, surfs at sunset in Ericeira. This was not a sport film: no riding waves, nothing competitive, just a person out on the water taking in the day.
The camera went into the Atlantic in splash housing, with splash bags on the focus puller’s and director’s monitors so both could see what was being filmed from in the sea. The water work was shot on 500T for its sensitivity; it’s tungsten-balanced stock, so it came back blue and was warmed right up in the grade. Test rolls were shot and processed before the shoot day, and the exposed negative travelled home as hand-carried precious cargo.
The coast faces west, so the hero shot depended on a visible sunset. We held two days, cross-read four forecast services against a local meteorological report. The sky cleared.
BTS
Four BTS films, one combined
cut, shot on digital and 16mm.
One BTS film per country plus a combined piece, shot on digital alongside the 35mm and graded at Harbor with the campaign proper. Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst’s reaction to the first one, in full: “Better than I was hoping.” These are the only films in the campaign that carry voiceover, kept at the client’s request.
The BTS package alone ran to 155 planned deliverables: five films, five ratios, three durations, every captioned version delivered uncaptioned as well, subtitles held inside social safe zones. For a campaign about giving people their time back, the making-of turned out to be the proof that the calm was real.
The long-form event film
The Berlin Screener:
ten minutes, four screens
Cohere launched the campaign with an invite-only evening at Kraftwerk, Berlin on 10 September 2026, and asked for a film to hold the room. The Berlin Screener is a 10 minute 16 second piece cut from all four shoots in both gauges, played sound-on across four 9ft by 12ft screens, finished with a full credits crawl. It exists because a Cohere co-founder asked early on for a version of the campaign that was, in his words, aggressively boring: long, slow, non-frenetic, and beautiful enough to stand alone without any branding at all.
Two formats were put to the client for the room: one long film in sync across all four screens, or four five-minute loops. We recommended the single film, argued it from the material rather than from convenience, and Cohere agreed.
Then the screener did a second job. It was graded first, and that grade became the master for the entire campaign: the vignettes, the cutdowns and the out-of-home assets were all cut from it or matched to it. One grade, one look, every asset, across four countries, four cameras and two film gauges. That single decision is why 190 assets feel like one campaign.
The delivery
One negative, 190 assets
Cohere’s growth team owned the media plan. Our job was to make one 35mm negative survive it: four markets, three languages, and 41 distinct pixel dimensions across office screens, billboards, bus shelters, airports and underground panels, plus a connected TV set engineered to platform spec.
Versioning
15 master loops across seven aspect-ratio bands instead of a hundred one-off files, built from the textless master so language lives in a text layer. Every ratio recomposed, never letterboxed.
Typography
Prompt type re-set per format, with a separate 9:16 set held at full size and split across two lines. Location cards and the end lockup survive in every version, at every duration.
Connected TV
14 files shipped rather than the 140 first scoped, because the other 126 couldn’t physically run on the platforms in the buy, and we said so. One −23 LUFS print serves both platforms.
Out-of-home
High-resolution stills pulled straight off the negative, graded to match the films. Five board sizes exceeded the 4K scan, so the upscale was raised with the client and decided jointly.
Clean, prompt-free masters went to Cohere so their own team could localise in-house. And the 60-second connected TV cut.
The look
Grading four
countries to one look
The grade brief asked for a slightly heightened naturalism, and it’s worth quoting because the finished films are this sentence, executed: contrast that feels inky, rich deep shadows, nicely shaped midtone contrast, softened off with slightly faded blacks. A squelchy, deep, colour-rich piece.
Each country then got its own note inside that look: warmth pushed for the maple boiling in Canada, a moodier hand for Oslo, colour separation hunted out of the Cornish mist, and the tungsten-balanced water footage from Portugal warmed right up. The vignettes and the screener are soundscape-led; Charlie wanted no music at all, Cohere wanted score, and the landing point, an ambient original score by Rowan Perkins sitting underneath the location sound, is better than either. Sine Studio delivered 29 mixes across the campaign, each with stems and an M&E. Post-production ran through our London team end to end.
Camera
Arricam LT · 4-perf 35mm · 4:3 ground glass · Bolex 16mm for texture
Lenses
Angénieux Optimo 28–340mm T3.2 · TLS-rehoused Canon K-35 primes
Film Stock
Kodak Vision3 250D & 500T (35mm) · 50D & 250D (16mm)
BTS cameras
Sony FX6 & FX3 · Blackmagic URSA Mini
Lab & scan
Cinelab Film & Digital, Slough · 4K Scanity · Oslo leg processed and scanned locally
Grade
Harbor Picture Company, Farringdon
Sound
Sine Studio · 29 mixes · stereo, stems and M&E per piece
Score
Original score by Rowan Perkins (LOXE)
“Four international shoots with talent
diaries moving underneath you is not a
small thing to land. Well done to you.”
Joel Evey, VP Brand, Cohere
Questions
About this project.
Here Now Films produced the campaign for Cohere, commissioned directly: creative development, all four international shoots, edit, versioning and delivery. Charlie Coombes directed, Spike Morris shot all four legs, Cinelab processed and scanned, Harbor graded, and Sine Studio mixed.
Because the format was the message. An AI company choosing the most analogue format available says something about how it sees its product, and film’s discipline shows on screen: a 400ft roll runs about three and a half minutes, so every set-up is boarded and every zoom rehearsed.
Four countries, one principal photography day in each: a family maple wood in Ontario, central Oslo with 30 extras, the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall across three land ownerships, and Ericeira on Portugal’s Atlantic coast, with the camera in the sea in splash housing.
190 assets: a two-minute hero film in eleven versions, four vignettes in eleven versions each, five behind-the-scenes films across 155 planned deliverables, a ten-minute screening film for Berlin, a 14-file connected TV set, and out-of-home stills pulled from the negative, in three languages for four markets.
No. Cohere’s growth team owned the media plan. Our job was engineering: making one 35mm negative and one grade survive 41 distinct screen dimensions, connected TV specs and three languages without breaking the look.
Get In Touch
Planning a brand campaign?
If you’re weighing up something at this scale, or wondering whether film is the right format for the story you’ve got, drop us a line. Ed reads every email that comes in through the site, and the people who answer your first message are the people who’ll be on set. More of our brand film work is a click away.
Commissioned by
Campaign
AI for Empowerment · launched 8 September 2026
Director
Charlie Coombes
Producer · Canada, Norway, Cornwall
Giorgia Gray
Director of Photography
Spike Morris
Sound design & mix
Sine Studio
Executive Producer
Ed Smit
Head of Post
Alexander Webb
Service production · Portugal
Ready To Shoot, Lisbon
Producer · Portugal
Will Parnall
Editors
Lewis Bullock · Matt Wong · Tom Byrne · Sam Davies
Original score
Rowan Perkins (LOXE)
BTS
Matt Wong (Astral Creative) · Cyrus Nezami
Service Production – Norway
Einar Film, Oslo
Producer · Portugal
Will Parnall
Art Director
Amy Turner
Grade
Harbor Picture Company, Farringdon
Lab & scan
Cinelab Film & Digital, Slough