Lowkey Turns 5 : A Year-by-Year Retrospective

Before the Beginning

Long before officiating the company, Connor and Jamie were making short films under the Lowkey name - these were passion projects shot between jobs on major film sets. That hands-on experience on big-budget productions gave them an early insight into what not to replicate and why creating a studio with strong ethics and real human values mattered.

In January 2020, both founders quit their jobs to go all in on personal development and prep. And by August 2020, Lowkey Films was officially born.

What follows is a year-by-year account of their first half-decade.

Year One (2020-2021) Hit the Ground Running

Launching mid-pandemic didn’t stop Lowkey from gaining serious momentum. We kicked things off with a string of music videos for artists including AJ Tracey, James Arthur, and Lola Young, alongside a major contract with TikTok. We found that being super nimble and agile at this time meant we could move fast when the industry was in a state of flux and uncertainty.

By Christmas, we’d hired our first full-time team member and set up our first office. We closed out the year continuing to build strong foundations in music with our biggest job to date for Dave - Money Talks, all the while securing financing for our first narrative feature, Kindling, which had been in the making since 2015.

Year Two (2021-2022) Growing Pains and Big Leaps

This year was full of lessons. We’d gone from two mates making things for fun to running a growing team, and the learning curve was steep.

We shot our debut feature, Kindling, an incredible experience, but one that pulled both of us as founders away from day-to-day operations. We wanted to sustain what we had built in the short-form space, and so we brought on new hires, which included a Head of Production, an in-house editor and more production support, but with limited time for onboarding, the growth outpaced our systems.

The year ended on shaky ground: busy, exciting, but financially unstable and being completely honest, we were chasing our tails.

Year Three (2022-2023): Pause, Reflect, Rebuild

By now, it was clear that music videos alone couldn’t sustain the in-house team. So came one of our hardest decisions yet, which was to essentially ‘start again’. This meant stopping doing post in-house by letting an amazing employee go and returning to it just being the two of us to catch our breath, something we never expected to have to do. 

This was the 'rebuild' year. We focused on personal growth, re-evaluated what kind of work we wanted to do, and began strengthening the foundations that we’d need to scale up again, but this time doing it properly. We sought professional mentorship & built systems. The way we saw it was that we had tried to build a home without the strong foundations clearly in place to build on top of. We knew we needed commercial work to support the financial arm of the company while we developed our first slate of features, but we also needed to grow as people.

That rebuild paid off: we brought on Tara Bartlett to lead music as a more commercially viable department, and we won our first major US TVC with Chicago DDB & Coors Banquet. This was the boost we needed, and we used it as the springboard for a big new business push.

Meanwhile, we travelled the world screening Kindling at film festivals - from the US to China. We finished the year releasing Kindling in the UK & the USA, which helped us make headway in the narrative space.

Year Four (2023-2024): Realigning with Purpose

After Kindling’s release, we signed a three-feature deal with Independent Entertainment. That, coupled with a renewed purpose in commercials, gave us the confidence to think differently - to stop trying to fit into the traditional production mould, and instead build a model that reflected who we really were.

Alongside bringing on board Tara and a growing in-house team, we worked to completely restructure how we worked in the music space. The ‘Special Projects’ department was formed, launching our 360 creative offering, ‘The Suite Shop’. We decided to stop representing directors in the traditional sense in order to work more freely with creatives across the board. 

Commercial work started coming in more fluidly, but at this time, we also made some tough calls, turning down work from oil giants and political groups we didn’t align with. It became clear we needed to be bolder about our values - not just privately, but publicly.

That decision kicked off our B Corp journey, a long and intense process, but one that gave us clarity about what we stood for and how we wanted to work moving forward.

Alongside our narrative slate getting traction and the three-feature deal, we were able to attach major Hollywood talent to our feature ‘Salvable’ from our music video directors Franklin & Marchetta, which we then shot in Wales in April 2024. 

Having produced more documentary-style work through the ‘Special Projects’ department and with our feature doc ‘Dear Future Children’ selling to Netflix - we made the initial steps to launch a documentary department - quietly in the background at first. 

Year Five (2024-2025): Alignment Over Hype

This year has been one of the most creatively fulfilling and values-aligned chapters for us yet.

Salvable sold to Lionsgate US and a wealth of other territories. We financed another feature, and have two more set to shoot in the next 18 months.

In documentary, we officially launched our slate at Cannes 2025, after a year of development on projects that feel urgent, cultural and necessary.

Commercially, it has been quieter in line with a lot of the rest of the commercial industry, but it’s been more meaningful. We’ve worked on projects that have brought huge personal and creative value, including Series 2 of a Toyota-branded entertainment series, a 5-minute documentary with Dua Lipa and a range of creative direction work via The Suite Shop.

And finally to cap off the five year journey, in March 2025, we officially became a B Corp. Instead of shouting about it straight away, we took three months to pause, reflect, and realign all our materials - from our new website, to brand decks and a plan for the next five-years so that our external voice truly reflects who we are internally.

Looking Forward

We are so proud of the five-year journey that has got us to this place - the ups and the downs. While the industry feels more in flux than ever, we continue to see growth across all our departments, and what makes us prouder than anything is that the work we’re creating is aligning with us both creatively and ethically. 

We have big plans for the next five years before we hit our 10-year anniversary - but as always, the biggest goal is to remain happy and true to our values as people and as a company.