Cornish Lithium

Cornish Lithium is on a mission to extract lithium responsibly from the geology beneath Cornwall, helping to secure a domestic supply for electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage. They’re based at Tremough Innovation Centre in Penryn, the same building as us, which is how the conversation started.

They wanted a pair of films for their website that could tell a story most people don’t know: that the mining maps and documents left behind over centuries of Cornish mining aren’t just historical artefacts. They’re tools that directly inform where and how Cornish Lithium works today.

Past meets present

The first film traces the history of mining in Cornwall from the Bronze Age through to the present day. Tin traded with Mediterranean civilisations. Copper that fuelled the industrial revolution. The steam engines, safety lamps, and innovations that came out of this county. It’s a story that runs through Cornwall’s landscape and culture, and it sets the context for what Cornish Lithium is doing now.

The second film focuses on something we found genuinely fascinating: the digital mapping process. Cornish Lithium employs an archivist who works in the building, carefully cleaning, preserving, and digitising hand-drawn maps and charts, some of them hundreds of years old. These documents, scattered across museums, archives, and private collections, are then combined with modern geophysical data and satellite imagery to create detailed 3D models. Those models guide real-world drilling operations. Old hand-drawn treasure maps, essentially, being used to find lithium.

Writing the story right

A project like this lives or dies on the script. The subject matter is technical, the history is rich, and the voiceover needed to carry both without losing an audience. For that, we brought in Radix Communications, a B2B copywriting agency we’ve been collaborating with since 2015.

We work with Radix whenever a project needs that extra layer of specialist writing: complex subject matter, technical narratives, scripts that need to land with a specific audience. Their writers take the time to understand the client’s world before putting anything on paper, and they deliver scripts that are structured around how the film will actually look and feel on screen. It makes our job in production considerably easier, and it makes the final films sharper.

For Cornish Lithium, Radix handled both scripts, weaving together the historical narrative and technical detail while we focused on the visual storytelling: the texture of the old documents, the contrast between archive rooms and modern geology software, the Cornish landscape that connects past and present.

It’s a good example of how we work. Rich and Grant lead every project creatively, but when a brief calls for additional expertise, we bring in people we trust. The thinking and direction stays with us. The end result is better for the collaboration.