Film House, Soho: a pre-launch film series for Hines

Film House, Soho: a pre-launch film series for Hines

Client: Hines Building: Film House, 142 Wardour Street, Soho, London W1F Scope: Pre-launch content — vision, architecture and amenity films Delivered: Film series plus social cutdowns

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The problem with marketing a building that doesn't exist yet

Film House is a Grade A refurbishment of an eight-storey Art Deco block on Wardour Street — the building that housed Pathé's first British outpost, and later Universal Pictures. Hines secured planning in January 2024 and set about turning a tired Soho landmark into around 96,000 sq ft of Grade A workspace, with a double-height reception, a rooftop club lounge and bar, a gym, end-of-trip facilities and a basement cinema that nods at the building's history. White Red designed it. It targeted BREEAM Excellent and WELL Platinum, and it sits roughly a hundred metres from the Elizabeth line at Tottenham Court Road.

All of which is a compelling proposition, and none of which was visible for most of the programme. For eighteen months, what a prospective occupier could actually see on Wardour Street was hoarding.

That is the pre-launch problem in one sentence. The commercial case for a building is at its most persuasive in the year before it opens — that is when occupiers with a lease event coming up are drawing shortlists, when agents are having early conversations, when a scheme either enters the market's consciousness or doesn't. But it is also the window in which the building is least presentable. So most schemes wait. They market on CGI and a brochure, then start telling the real story at practical completion — by which point the shortlists are already written.

Hines didn't want to arrive cold. We were brought in to give Film House a presence in the market while it was still a building site.

What was actually at stake

A single-let or near-single-let outcome on a West End building of this size is worth a great deal more than the marketing budget that supports it, and it turns on a small number of conversations with a small number of occupiers. In a market where prime West End supply is tight and occupiers are increasingly buying a story — heritage, sustainability credentials, the thing their staff will tell their friends about — the job of pre-launch content is narrow and specific.

It is not to advertise. It is to make sure that when a leasing team gets in front of the right occupier, there is something to send afterwards that does the building justice, and that the building already means something before anyone walks through the door.

The approach: three jobs, not one film

The instinct on a scheme like this is to commission one flagship film. We argued for a series instead, because a pre-launch campaign has to serve several audiences over a long period, and one film asked to do everything ends up doing none of it well.

The vision film carried the argument for why the building exists — Soho, the media heritage, the case Hines was making about what workspace in this part of London should feel like in 2025 and beyond. This is the piece for the first meeting and the top of a leasing deck.

The architecture film dealt with the fabric: what White Red actually did to the building, how the retrofit works, the detail that a development surveyor or a demanding occupier's project team wants to interrogate. Retrofit is a harder story to tell than new-build, because the achievement is partly invisible. Film is unusually good at this — you can show the old structure and the new intervention in the same shot.

The amenity films covered the parts of the building people ask about last and decide on first: the rooftop, the reception, the end-of-trip facilities, the cinema. These cut down naturally into short-form for the agents' and the client's social channels, which is where a pre-launch scheme picks up its ambient awareness.

Sequencing mattered as much as the edit. Filming across the construction programme rather than in a single visit meant we captured states of the building that no longer exist — and it meant Hines had material to release steadily rather than a single drop at completion.

What we filmed, and why it was shot that way

Everything was filmed on site, in the real building, in real light. That is a deliberate choice with a commercial rationale, not an aesthetic preference.

CGI shows what a building will be. Film shows what is real now — and by the pre-launch window, a great deal is already real: the volume of the spaces, the quality of the structure, the view from the roof, the street the building sits on. An occupier can tell the difference between a render and a room. When you are asking someone to commit to a lease on a building they cannot yet walk around, credibility is the whole product.

We worked around a live construction programme, which is its own discipline: fitting shoot days into the contractor's schedule, working with site management rather than against it, and knowing which weeks of the programme will actually yield usable material. Soho adds its own constraints — narrow streets, permits, and a working neighbourhood that doesn't stop for a camera.

The result

The films gave Hines and its leasing team a set of assets that existed months before the building did: something to open a meeting with, something to send after one, and a steady flow of short-form material that kept Film House visible through the quiet middle of a construction programme.

The building went on to let in full. In May 2026 it was reported that Microsoft had agreed to take the entirety of Film House for its UK AI teams — around 94,000 sq ft — with Cushman & Wakefield and RX London acting for Hines.

We are not going to claim a film let a building. Lettings of that size are won by the asset, the location and the leasing team. What content does is narrower and worth being honest about: it makes the case earlier, to more people, in a form they will actually watch and forward, at the point in the programme when there is nothing else to show them. On Film House, the scheme entered the market with a story already told.

If you have a scheme in construction

The window we are describing is open right now on your project, and it closes at practical completion. The two or three years while a development is being built are the years most schemes never film — and they are the only years in which the story can be told as it happens rather than reconstructed afterwards.

If you have a building completing in the next 6–18 months, that is the conversation to have now, not at handover.

Build your quote — or send us the scheme and the completion date and we'll tell you what's worth filming and when.