Your university does important work.
Help the right people understand it.
We make 2D animation for universities. The kind that turns complex research into something a funding body, prospective student, or public audience can actually follow.
World-class research.
Audiences who switch off.
Universities produce work that genuinely matters. But the people who need to understand it (research councils, industry partners, prospective students, the public) are busy and easily lost by technical language.
A five-minute animation can do what a 40-page impact report cannot: hold attention, tell a story, and leave people with a clear sense of what you do and why it matters.
We've animated antibiotic resistance research, student wellbeing campaigns, identity studies in children in care, and biosimilar medicines. The more complex the subject, the more a well-made explainer earns its keep.
Research impact communication
REF impact case studies, public engagement work, and research summaries — for audiences who weren't in the lab.
Student recruitment
Bring programmes to life for applicants choosing between you and a dozen competitors.
Funding & grant storytelling
Give UKRI, research councils, and industry partners a clear, compelling case for why this work deserves backing.
Staff training & internal comms
Explain new policies and processes consistently — across departments, campuses, and roles.
We're not the flashiest studio.
We are the best storytellers.
After ten years making animation for universities and research institutions, we've learned one thing above all: the script is everything. A beautiful animation built on a weak narrative doesn't work. We spend more time on the story than any other part of the project.
We learn your subject
We read the papers. We ask the questions your audience would ask. We find the story inside the methodology.
We write for your audience
Whether it's a UKRI panel or a 17-year-old choosing a course, we calibrate tone, language, and detail precisely.
Script approved before animation
You review and approve every word before a single frame is drawn. No surprises at the expensive end of production.
We work to HEI timelines
We understand procurement, sign-off chains, and semester pressures. We plan around them from day one.
Assets you can reuse
Final files optimised for your website, social channels, conference screens, and event displays.
Files are yours completely
Once the project is paid, all assets are yours. No ongoing licensing, no usage restrictions.
From brief to
finished film.
Every project follows the same four stages. You review and approve at each one, nothing expensive gets built on an unapproved foundation.
Discovery call
We learn about your project, your audience, and what success looks like. No obligations, just an honest conversation.
Script & storyboard
We write the narrative and show you how it will look before we animate anything. You approve every word and frame.
Animation
We build the final film. You see a review cut before it's locked. Clear feedback rounds, no surprise invoices.
Delivery
Final files in all formats: MP4, web-optimised, subtitled, platform-specific versions. Everything is yours.
Some of our work in
higher education.
Making a five-country research study legible to the policymakers, clinicians, and public audiences who needed to act on it
Imperial College London needed to communicate the findings of a significant international study to audiences far beyond the academic community. The research team had interviewed 54 healthcare professionals across 24 hospitals in five countries: England, Norway, France, India, and Burkina Faso, to understand the cultural, structural, and systemic barriers to effective antibiotic management globally. The findings were important. Getting them heard required a completely different kind of communication from the academic paper.
We built the story around the researcher herself, a character who travels between five countries, sits in hospitals and clinics from Burkina Faso to Norway, and draws conclusions from what she finds. The film opens with bacteria defeating antibiotics and closes with antibiotics winning, a visual promise that frames everything in between. The science is accurate throughout. The storytelling makes it land.
Communicating sensitive research about identity, race and religion, for the practitioners who needed to act on it, not just the academics who produced it
Research about identity in children in care sits at the intersection of social work, psychology, ethnicity, religion, and lived experience. It involves real people's deeply personal stories about race, belonging, family, and what it means to feel seen. The brief was to communicate the findings in a way that was accurate enough to satisfy an academic audience, sensitive enough to honour the experiences of the children involved, and accessible enough to actually reach the social workers, carers, and policymakers who needed to act on it.
We built the animation around two character-led stories, Reema and Anna, whose experiences illustrated the research findings from the inside rather than explaining them from the outside. The three findings were woven into the narrative rather than listed as conclusions. By the end, the viewer understood what needed to change and why, without feeling lectured at.
A student wellbeing campaign that had to feel genuinely supportive, and not like a corporate wellness video
LSE needed to reach students at their most vulnerable: new arrivals navigating homesickness, academic pressure, and the particular loneliness of arriving at a demanding institution in a new city. The brief was a student wellbeing campaign built around four practical tips. Mental health communications are easy to get wrong: too corporate and students switch off, too heavy and it creates anxiety rather than relieving it. The tone had to be warm without being patronising, honest without being alarming, and actionable without feeling prescriptive.
We created a main film and four shorter clips cut specifically for social, with each tip becoming a standalone piece of content for Instagram or student news emails. The writing acknowledged real feelings directly while keeping the overall tone forward-looking. The visual approach used a student character whose experiences were specific enough to feel real without being melodramatic.
In their
own words.
Our research is genuinely complex and we've been let down before by agencies who nodded along in the briefing and then produced something that bore very little resemblance to what we actually do. That didn't happen here. Beluga read the papers, came back with intelligent questions, and produced a script that our PI signed off with almost no changes. That almost never happens. We used the finished film in our REF impact submission.
The research involved real children's stories about race, identity, and belonging, so we were nervous about how an animation studio would handle it, but they navigated it brilliantly and captured the emotional nuances whilst keeping all the information accurate. We also have a long internal sign-off chain and I was bracing for the usual back-and-forth, but Beluga handled everything so smoothly. I've worked with far bigger agencies that don't manage projects as well as this.
Student wellbeing communications are easy to get wrong: too corporate and students don't engage, too heavy and it creates more anxiety than it relieves. Beluga found the right register immediately. The finished film felt like it was talking to students, not at them. We've used it every year since as part of our welcome communications.
team
What people
usually ask.
How much does a university project cost?
Most projects sit between £2,500 and £8,000 depending on length, complexity, and revision rounds. We give fixed quotes after a discovery call, no surprises.
Can you work within university procurement requirements?
Yes. We're familiar with purchase order processes, framework agreements, and multi-stage sign-off. We ask about your procurement requirements at the outset and plan accordingly.
How long does a project take?
A typical two-to-three minute animation takes four to six weeks from brief to delivery. If you have a hard deadline: an event, a grant submission, an open day, tell us upfront and we'll plan backwards from it.
Do we own the final files?
Yes, completely. Once the project is paid, all files are yours, no ongoing licensing or usage restrictions.
What if the subject matter is highly technical?
That's what we do best. We've animated antibiotic resistance research, student wellbeing campaigns, identity studies in children in care, and biosimilar medicines. We research properly, ask the right questions, and check accuracy with you before anything is locked.
Tell us what you need
people to understand.
We'll tell you honestly whether animation is the right approach, and what it would cost.
Book a discovery callOr email hello@belugaanimation.com directly