About the Film

This behind the scenes documentary film follows artist and filmmaker Matt Stokes during the making of Objects to See Further, commissioned by Great North Run Culture as part of their Great North Greats programme, a year-long celebration of people who shaped the North East. I spent two days filming Matt’s process as he built a layered historical narrative out of Tyneside archives, museum collections and local stories. As a heritage filmmaker based in the North East, this was exactly the kind of project I look for, one where a piece of local history is being actively reassembled rather than simply retold.

Telling Tyneside’s Story

Objects to See Further takes viewers back to 1871, a year that turned out to connect four very different figures: Robert Stirling Newall, an engineer fascinated by astronomy, industrialist William Armstrong, celebrated rower James Renforth, and Tyneside songwriter Joe Wilson, whose Geordie dialect songs spoke directly to his own community. Each left a distinct mark on the region, and Matt’s film sets out to show how their lives, without ever meeting, quietly overlapped.

Behind the Camera

Filming Matt’s process meant watching his collaboration with Tyne and Wear Museums up close, an access he described as unusually open.

Working so closely with Tyne and Wear Museums and being able to access objects and artefacts in the way that was possible was something that was quite new to me. I’ve used archives and collections before, but I’ve not had such open access.

One object in particular anchored the whole project: a large refractor telescope built in Gateshead that once drew astronomers from across the country. As Matt’s research went on, 1871 kept resurfacing, from the telescope’s completion to the Nine Hours Strike at Armstrong Works, which pushed for shorter working hours and, in turn, more time for pursuits like rowing.

I was becoming aware of other characters or people related to objects, and suddenly the year that the telescope was completed, 1871, kept cropping up.

Music and Authenticity

Music carried much of the film’s sense of place. Musician Richard Dawson played Joe Wilson, and spoke about feeling a genuine pull towards the songwriter’s approach.

The role I play in the film is Joe Wilson, who was this Tyneside songwriter. His idea was to speak directly to people of his community as directly as possible.

Careful period detail, from costume to the staging of crowd scenes, helped pull the reconstructions back into Victorian Tyneside, and capturing that attention to detail on camera was as satisfying as it was demanding.

Filming the Process

Making a behind the scenes documentary film about somebody else’s film meant staying a step removed throughout, filming Matt directing the cast, briefing extras on period detail, and handling artefacts on loan from the museum, rather than any of the finished scenes themselves. That distance is where most of the interest sits, in the decisions and small negotiations that never make it into the film being documented but shape almost everything about how it turns out.

Weaving Invisible Threads

Matt’s aim throughout was to reveal how these four lives interwove across science, industry, sport and culture, never forcing a connection that wasn’t genuinely there.

The final film really was looking at a tiny slice of each of those people’s lives, and how they did all interweave together.

That is really what a behind the scenes documentary film is for, following the thread from a museum object to a finished scene, and showing the research and trial that usually stays invisible in the final work. Objects to See Further shares that territory with The Order of Things, another Great North Run Culture commission I filmed built around video art and public installation.