Changing Careers

The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of sciences – the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, founded in 1660. Its fellowship includes some of the most distinguished scientists, engineers and technologists in the world, and its mission is to promote excellence in science for the benefit of humanity.

As part of that mission, the Royal Society actively works to support scientists at every stage of their careers, including helping them understand the full range of paths available to them beyond the traditional academic track.

The Royal Society commissioned Nutmeg to produce a series of films exploring what it looks like to move between academia and industry, and back again. The ambition was to show practising scientists that a career in science need not follow a single path, and that moving between the two worlds is not only possible but often enriching.

Six case studies were selected from across the UK – real scientists who had done exactly this – to give the films the specificity and authenticity that presenter-led explainers could never achieve.

We met with each of the six scientists in their working environments, which meant visiting some extraordinary places. Among the contributors was the Artificial Intelligence lead at Microsoft and the chief scientist at the world’s biggest manufacturer of graphene. These are people doing remarkable things, and the films needed to capture both the substance of their work and the humanity of their stories.

To hold the series together visually, we developed a green screen visual device that allowed us to shift each contributor’s background between an academic setting and an industry environment within the same interview. As the scientists talked about moving between worlds, the world behind them changed. A simple idea with a clean editorial logic that gave the series a coherent visual language without requiring expensive multi-location filming for every contributor.

The production combined interview footage, location filming and motion graphics to create films that were informative without being dry, and personal without losing scientific credibility.

The Changing Careers series achieved over 250,000 views, a great result for an institutional film series, and a clear signal that the combination of credible contributors, sharp editorial focus and confident production values found a genuine audience well beyond the Royal Society’s existing network.

For the Royal Society, the films extended their reach to a much broader audience than a printed report or conference presentation ever could, giving them a shareable, platform-ready series that carried their message about scientific careers to people actively thinking about their own professional futures.