Some places resist being summed up in a tagline. Old Lanwarnick is one of them. Tucked away at the end of a single-track lane near Duloe, fifteen minutes from the South Cornwall coast, it is a 34-acre working farm turned multi-award-winning luxury holiday retreat — five-star Gold accommodation that has been featured in the Sunday Times' "50 Coolest Cottages" and crowned Cornwall's Dog-Friendly Business of the Year. But spend an afternoon there and you quickly realise the awards only tell part of the story. The real draw is harder to photograph: the particular quiet of a Cornish valley with no passing traffic, the slow rhythm of life among the animals, the feeling of a place that has been lived in for centuries.

That was the brief we set ourselves when Old Lanwarnick asked 96 Studios to make their brand film. Not to list the features. To capture the feeling.

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Why a Holiday Cottage Business Needs

More Than Photographs

 

The self-catering market in Cornwall is crowded, and it is competitive. A search for "luxury dog-friendly cottages in Cornwall" returns hundreds of listings, many of them genuinely beautiful, all of them leaning on the same vocabulary — luxury, cosy, escape, hot tub, dog-friendly. Stills photography, however polished, struggles to separate one converted barn from the next. Every property has flagstone floors and a wood burner glowing in the corner. Every listing promises peace and quiet.

Film does something photographs cannot. It moves through a space the way a guest would. It carries sound — the stream, the chickens, the crackle of a fire, the particular hush of a valley after dark. It shows time passing: morning light across the fields, a dog stretching out by the burner, children disappearing into the woods to hunt for Cornish faeries. For a business whose entire proposition is an experience rather than a product, that ability to convey atmosphere is not a luxury. It is the most direct route to the booking.

A well-made brand film also works far harder than a single piece of content. It becomes the hero of the homepage, the asset that holds attention on social media, the thing that runs in the background at a wedding fair or a tourism showcase, and a library of moments that can be re-cut into shorter pieces for Instagram and paid advertising for months afterward. One shoot, used well, becomes a year of marketing.

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Our Approach: Documentary, Not Advert
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At 96 Studios we make documentary-style brand films. No scripts, no presenters, no actors pretending to enjoy a holiday. We believe the most persuasive thing you can show a prospective guest is the truth of a place, captured honestly and shot beautifully. That philosophy shaped every decision on the Old Lanwarnick project.

We spent time on site before we shot a single frame, learning the property the way a guest discovers it gradually — which corner of the farmhouse catches the late sun, where the dogs naturally settle, the moment in the evening when the valley goes still. That groundwork matters. It is the difference between a film that looks like a holiday and a film that feels like one.

The result is observational. We let the place reveal itself. Rather than staging a forced "family enjoying breakfast" scene, we waited for the genuine ones and shot them with care. The film follows the arc of a stay — arrival down the country lane, the unpacking and the exhale, days spent exploring, evenings winding down in the hot tub under the stars — so that anyone watching can imagine themselves inside it.

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The Cornwall Question: Shooting Light

and Landscapes

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Cornwall is one of the most filmed landscapes in Britain, and for good reason, but it is also one of the most demanding to shoot. The weather turns on a sixpence. The light that makes the county magical at golden hour can vanish into flat grey within the hour. Working here means knowing the land, reading the sky, and being ready to move when the conditions are right rather than when the schedule says so.

Being a Cornwall-based production company is a genuine advantage here. We are not driving down from London hoping for a clear afternoon. We can plan around the tides and the forecast, return for the shot we missed, and bring a local understanding of how this particular stretch of coast and countryside behaves through the seasons. For Old Lanwarnick, that meant capturing the property in the kind of light that does justice to thirty-four acres of unspoiled valley — the soft early mornings, the long golden evenings, and the moody, atmospheric weather that is every bit as much a part of Cornwall's character as the sunshine.

We shoot on a cinema camera with a colour science geared toward natural, filmic skin tones and rich landscape detail, and we hold a CAA drone licence, which let us open the film with the kind of aerial perspective that shows exactly how secluded and green this corner of Cornwall really is — the single lane threading through the hills, the cluster of converted barns, the woodland and fields stretching out around them. Those establishing shots do an enormous amount of work: in a few seconds they communicate "you will be completely away from it all" more convincingly than any paragraph of copy.

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What the Film Needed to Communicate

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Working closely with the owners, we identified the handful of things the film absolutely had to convey, and built the edit around them.

The first was seclusion without isolation — the reassurance that you are blissfully tucked away, yet only fifteen minutes from the beach and a short drive from Looe, Polperro and Fowey. The second was the dog-friendly heart of the business, which is not a bolt-on but central to its identity and its awards; the film makes space for the dogs because the guests do. The third was luxury that still feels like a farm — the Egyptian cotton bedding and the hot tubs sitting comfortably alongside the chickens, the woodland walks and the muddy boots by the door. And the fourth was the sense of reconnection, the reason families and couples return year after year: the chance to slow down, be together, and remember what a holiday is supposed to feel like.

Every sequence in the finished film earns its place against one of those pillars. That discipline is what stops a brand film from becoming a pretty but aimless montage.

 

THE RESULT

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The finished brand film gives Old Lanwarnick a piece of content that works across every channel — the centrepiece of the website, a scroll-stopping presence on Instagram and Facebook, and a foundation of footage that can be cut into shorter reels promoting individual cottages, the new glamping capsules, the spa offering, or seasonal availability. It is the kind of asset that keeps paying back long after the shoot wraps.

More than that, it gives a prospective guest the one thing a listing cannot: the feeling of already having been there. And for a business built entirely on the quality of an experience, that feeling is what turns a browser into a booking.