Behind the scenes on one of NMMC’s flagship exhibitions, meeting the curators and scientists who brought sea monsters from myth into the present day.
The National Maritime Museum Cornwall is one of our closest neighbours, sitting on the waterfront in Falmouth just a short drive from our studio in Penryn. We’ve worked with the team there on a number of projects over the years and the relationship’s still going strong, but Monsters of the Deep is one we look back on particularly fondly.
The exhibition opened in August 2020, a date that carries its own weight. The museum had been closed through the first lockdown and was reopening into a world that had shifted considerably. Monsters of the Deep was their flagship offering for the season: a major exhibition built around the myths, the legends, and the cutting-edge marine science of what actually lurks beneath the surface of the world’s oceans. We were brought in to capture it on film, both for the museum’s own channels and for press and marketing use.
An exhibition built around stories
What made Monsters of the Deep so compelling as a subject was the way it threaded centuries of folklore together with present-day science. Sea serpents and krakens sat alongside genuine discoveries from the deep ocean, creatures so strange they barely seem possible. The exhibition’s job was to ask a simple question: where does the line between monster and animal actually fall?
We worked closely with the museum team to develop a small series of films that could carry that idea across different channels. A main exhibition highlight piece to set the tone and draw people in and a set of interviews with the people behind the project, going deeper into the science and the curation.
Meeting the people behind the exhibition
This is the part we love most about exhibition work, and it’s something we’ve come back to time and again with the team at NMMC. The exhibitions themselves are fascinating in their own right, but the real gold is in the people who put them together. Their reasons for getting involved, the years of work behind each section, the small obsessions that shape the final visitor experience. There are always stories.
For Monsters of the Deep, we filmed interviews with three of the exhibition’s key contributors.
Dr Darren Naish, the exhibition’s Guest Curator and a leading zoologist, talked us through his role in shaping the show: the science, the storytelling, and the strange territory where the two meet. His enthusiasm for the subject was infectious and it gave us a real sense of why this exhibition mattered.
Dr Tammy Horton, also a Guest Curator on the exhibition, returned to the museum once it was fully installed and walked through it with us. Watching a curator see the finished space for the first time is lovely. There’s something about hearing them describe their own work after months of planning, fabrication, and install that you can’t manufacture.
Professor Edward Hill, Chief Executive of the National Oceanography Centre, gave us the wider picture. The NOC was a major partner on the exhibition, and Edward spoke to the role real-world ocean science plays in continuing to reveal what’s actually down there. The conversation pulled the whole thing back from myth and into present-day discovery.
Three different voices, three different angles on the same subject. That’s what gives a series like this its depth.
A flagship that travelled
Monsters of the Deep ran at National Maritime Museum Cornwall from August 2020 until 8 January 2023. That’s an unusually long run, partly a reflection of how strong the exhibition was and partly the unusual circumstances of the period. Off the back of its success in Falmouth, the exhibition went on to a second life at The Historic Dockyard Chatham, where it reached audiences far beyond Cornwall.
We’ve gone on to work with NMMC on other exhibitions and projects since, including Pirates. Each one brings its own story, its own cast of contributors, and its own small puzzle of how to capture a curated space on film. Monsters of the Deep was an early chapter in the relationship, and a really good one.
