Cyngor Gwynedd Council approached us to help bring a core piece of social work training to life: Reflective Practice. The script was written by experienced practitioners Siobhan Maclean and Wendy Roberts, ensuring the content was grounded firmly in real-world practice rather than theory alone.
Our brief was refreshingly open. Rather than asking for a traditional training video, the council gave us creative freedom to interpret the script visually with one clear goal: make it engaging, memorable, and genuinely useful.
We proposed an unexpected visual approach: a marble run. Inspired by the rise of “satisfying to watch” videos, the idea was to use motion, physics and visual rhythm to mirror the internal thought processes described in the script.
To Cyngor Gwynedd Council’s credit, they embraced the idea immediately, choosing something bold and engaging over something safe and forgettable.
Each stage of reflective practice was carefully mirrored on screen. When the narration discussed busy workloads, marbles clustered together, competing for space. When reflection opened up opportunities, pathways widened and multiple routes appeared. The animation wasn’t decorative — it was doing the thinking alongside the voiceover.
The entire environment was built in CGI, combining bespoke layout design with ready-made assets by Alan Lux (Superhive), a deliberate decision to use time and budget efficiently without compromising quality.
The marbles themselves were animated using Blender’s physics engine, allowing gravity, collisions and momentum to drive the motion naturally. Instead of keyframing every movement, we let maths do the heavy lifting. The animation felt organic, unpredictable and satisfying to watch.
The final film runs just under five minutes, but never feels its length.
Despite its runtime, Stages of Reflection has achieved a 72% audience retention rate, an exceptional result for a near five-minute educational video.
It continues to receive strong feedback from students and practitioners and is now used widely as CPD material across multiple agencies. One YouTube comment summed it up perfectly:
“Clicked for the marbles, stayed for the deep introspection. Thank you.”
By borrowing visual language from entertainment and pairing it with thoughtful, practitioner-led writing, the film turns reflective practice into something people choose to engage with, not something they endure.
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