Queen Mary Made an Ad About Me in 2022. I Just Watched It for the First Time.
Out of more than 25,000 students, three of us got picked. Four years later, I found the footage. Let me show you.
OK so here’s the thing.
I didn’t know this ad existed until April. Of this year. 2026.
I was looking through some old production assets for a different project — totally unrelated — and there it is. Sixty seconds. 1080p. Queen Mary University of London branding. Maia Films production card. And me, twenty years old, mid-puffer-jacket, walking out of Mile End station saying ”I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
I sat there for a minute. Watched it again. Then a third time.
Four years. This thing has been sitting on QMUL’s official YouTube channel for four years. And I just… found it. Like a postcard from a version of me I’d half-forgotten.
You should watch it: jjdreamss.com/team
OK #OKOCHA so backstory — let me set the scene.
Late 2021, early 2022. I’m a Norwegian kid in London — Oslo by way of Amsterdam by way of everywhere — trying to master UK-life during the back-half of COVID. Final exams brewing. Cost of living climbing. Friends I’d somehow pulled in alongside me as we tried to build something — call it an enterprise ecosystem, call it three half-formed brands held together with caffeine and conviction.
We were invisible. Or so we thought. Quietly breaking through in spaces our life-experience hadn’t quite caught up with yet. That was the iconic brilliance of it all.
And then — this is the surreal part — Queen Mary turned and looked at us.
Out of more than 25,000 students at QMUL, three of us got picked for a Careers and Enterprise marketing campaign. Three. Across the entire institution. I anchored the entrepreneur arc. The other two represented different post-graduate paths.
You couldn’t make this up. We were barely 20 and an institution with serious prestige and reach was telling us ”yeah, we’ll bet on you. Publicly. On camera.”
The shoot.
Filmed around Mile End and Stratford in early 2022. Director Laurie Barraclough at Maia Films (now Small Films Ltd). Producer Nadine Aldakheel. DOP and editor Guy Francis. Cam assist Lewis Watts. Account direction Oliver Knight.
What I remember: showing up. Doing the takes. Saying the lines like they meant something — because they did. ”I needed funding to get my business off the ground. The Careers Team helped me make sense of my ideas — and now they’re going to fund them.”
That wasn’t a script. That was reporting. Queen Mary’s Careers and Enterprise team had backed me genuinely — courses, 1-on-1 mentorship, guidance across multiple courses, continuous support from multiple departments both privately and publicly. The morale boost arrived right as deadlines were brewing and the cost of living was ever-soaring. The ad was just documenting what had already happened.
What I didn’t realize, when we wrapped, was that I wouldn’t see the finished thing for almost half a decade.
Why I missed it.
Honest answer? Life moved faster than the YouTube algorithm. The ad dropped on 15 July 2022 — which, hilariously, was the exact day my degree was officially conferred. I was deep in graduation week, and then deeper in a whole other story (which you’ll see in the documentary releasing this October — but that’s another email).
QMUL Careers and Enterprise published the spot on their sub-channel. 467 subscribers. Roughly 1,000 views in three years. The institution that produced it barely promoted it.
I had no idea.
What I see now, watching it back.
A few things hit me at once.
One. The friendships in that ad are still real. The handshake scene? That’s still my circle. Still building.
Two. What QMUL captured wasn’t just one business. It was an architectural instinct. The Careers Team invested in what they could see — a 20-year-old who said he wanted to build something. What they couldn’t see was the four-year arc that would compound from that backing.
Three. Watching yourself at 20 hits different at 24. And the strange part is — you’re watching it with me. After four silent years on a 467-sub channel, this ad is finally being seen. Together; must mean something right?
Four years on, the door’s still open. And the architecture behind the work has grown teeth.
Four years later — here’s what came after.
The ad never specifies what business I was starting. Smart, because it left room. What it became:
Drawing with Words → a linguistic decoder at excalibur.no
Drawing with Music → a sonic decoder at ovaltable.no
Drawing with Matter → a periodic decoder at atoms.no
Three decoders. Three Norwegian domains. All live right now. Each takes the same input and reads it through a different sense. (If that sentence reads strange, the post about the Trinity; https://insights.jjdreamss.com/p/i-built-a-decoder-three-of-them explains it properly).
The Queen Mary Careers Team backed an idea. The idea compounded. Here we are.
Watch the ad.
The full archive is now live at jjdreamss.com/team — the 60-second film, the production credits, and links to everything that came after.
Or watch it where QMUL first published it, four years ago: on the Queen Mary Careers and Enterprise YouTube channel:
Sixty seconds. Less time than it takes to make tea.
And if you watch it and find yourself thinking ”wait, but what happened between 2022 and 2026” — well. That’s exactly the gap my upcoming documentary fills.
The documentary releases 16 October 2026 as of now. Mark it.
TL;DR
Queen Mary picked three of us out of 25,000+ students for a 2022 ad campaign.
I anchored the entrepreneur arc.
I didn’t see the finished thing until April 2026 — four years late.
The Careers Team genuinely backed the business. Courses, mentorship, the lot.
That business became three live products and a documentary.
Full archive at jjdreamss.com/team
Grateful is an understatement.
— JJ (Joshua I.N Arthur / JJDREAMSS)