I developed the creative direction for the launch of Enlighten, Lichfield Cathedral’s new festival of ideas, taking the festival’s visual identity and shaping it into an analogue, experimental teaser that drove strong curiosity-led website engagement and set the tone for the wider content. I also produced the photography, video coverage and live social updates across the festival weekend.

Enlighten itself is a weekend of debates, conversations and keynote sessions inspired by Lichfield’s Enlightenment heritage, designed to encourage open, healthy discussion in an increasingly divided cultural landscape. Because the festival aimed to break expectations and reach new audiences, the teaser needed to look and feel unlike any content previously produced by the Cathedral.

I was inspired heavily at the time by the power of abstraction on social media to both spark curiosity and connect with a younger audience – one that we were keen to get involved with Enlighten. I developed a very analogue approach to the content, creating visual effects such as the water distortion type by hand with a perspex tray filled with distilled water over an iPad, to shooting the crash-zooms with a 2000s camcorder, all to create a piece that was built to break the expectations of what Lichfield Cathedral’s content was like and use curiosity to drive engagement.

The sound design followed the same analogue and experimental ethos. To reinforce the festival’s strapline, “Add Your Voice,” I recorded colleagues reading a generic script and layered their voices together to create a collective, multi-voice texture. Beneath this, I built an atmospheric bed inspired by sound design from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, using reversed recordings of the Cathedral’s choir and layering additional spoken lines to form a rising “cacophony of voices” reminiscent of the techniques used in the game to increase tension and unnerve the player. This was interwoven with homemade risers created from reversed everyday sounds and sharper effects such as glass shattering, a microwave hum and rapid camera shutters, giving the final audio a surreal, tactile and uneasy edge to build tension and spark curiosity.

Although the teaser performed modestly in terms of visible social engagement, it caused a significant spike in website visits on the day of release, demonstrating that curiosity, rather than likes or comments, was the primary driver of behaviour. Other promotional posts for the festival followed a similar pattern.

Across the festival weekend, I also documented the event through photography and video, capturing speakers, audiences and the atmosphere across all sessions – from leading academics and authors to public figures such as Sir Jeremy Hunt. Alongside this, I managed the Cathedral’s live social media coverage, delivering real-time updates, talk recaps and story content from inside the events.

Together, the teaser content and event coverage provided Lichfield Cathedral with a distinctive creative direction backed by clear behavioural results, as well as a bank of high-quality photo and video assets to support future years of the festival.