About This Collaborative Documentary Film

In 2018 I was commissioned by Curious Monkey theatre company, through the BAIT programme and funded by Woodhorn Charitable Trust, to make a film about a group in Ashington writing and recording a radio play. From March 2018 to March 2019, the group, made up of people of different generations from across South East Northumberland, wrote, performed and recorded a fictional radio drama set in Ashington, drawing on their own experience of the town, broadcast on Koast Radio in May 2019. This collaborative documentary film follows that process alongside the radio play itself.

Curious Monkey work across the North East making theatre rooted in real communities, and BAIT was set up as a programme to support exactly this kind of collaboration, giving a group time and space to develop a piece of work together rather than simply performing something written for them. From The Ashes sat squarely in that spirit, built slowly over the best part of a year rather than arriving fully formed.

Chosen by the Group

Before any filming started, the group auditioned filmmakers themselves and chose to work with me. That order of events shaped everything about how the project was set up. It was never going to be a documentary made about this group, it had to be made with them, and that mattered more to me than getting a particular kind of shot. Coming into a project already knowing that the people in it had chosen you, rather than the other way round, changes how you behave on the day.

Handing Over the Camera

I did not want to come in as the filmmaker and film everyone without them having any say in how that happened. So rather than conducting interviews myself, I set up cameras for the group to interview each other, and worked around those conversations picking up the b-roll while they talked. The documentary is built from what came out of that arrangement: their own questions to each other, in their own words, with my footage filling in the spaces around it rather than directing it. It meant giving up a certain amount of control over the finished shape of the film, in exchange for something closer to how the group actually talked to one another when a filmmaker wasn’t asking the questions.

A Radio Play About Ashington

Alongside the filming, the group was writing, rehearsing and eventually recording their own audio drama, drawing on stories from people living across South East Northumberland: memories of the town, its pit history, its changes over the decades, and the everyday texture of life there now. Seeing that process through, from early conversations about what stories mattered to them, through to a finished piece broadcast on local radio, gave the collaborative documentary film its own shape: not a single event captured on one day, but something built up gradually over close to a year, with the group’s confidence and sense of ownership over the material growing alongside it.

Writing Together

The script grew slowly out of group discussion rather than any single writer’s plan, with as many as fifteen or twenty people working through sections of it at a time. Decisions about the story were reached by group agreement rather than any one person’s preference: if the group was against an idea, you went with what the majority wanted instead. Characters disappeared from drafts and resurfaced weeks or months later, when someone realised an idea they had once dropped was exactly what a later scene needed, one writer’s throwaway line sparking a direction nobody had planned.

Recording at the YMCA

The finished scripts were recorded over three Saturdays at the YMCA in Ashington. Some of the sound was built through Foley work, recreating effects with everyday objects rather than a sound library. One example from the sessions has stuck with me: a two pound hot water bottle, squeezed and twisted in just the right way to make the sound of a car screeching to a halt.

A Community Within a Community

By the end, several of the people involved described what had formed as its own small community within the community, the kind of project where people who might not otherwise have crossed paths started stopping to talk whenever they saw each other around town. A number of the younger participants spoke about how much confidence they had gained over the year, and more than one person said the project had given them a chance to push back against how the region is often talked about, offering something they could point to and feel was genuinely theirs.

Filming a Collaborative Documentary

Projects like this ask something different of a documentary filmmaker than most commissions do. The value of the finished film sits as much in how it was made as in what it shows, and being auditioned by the group rather than the other way round is a good reminder that a collaborative documentary film only really earns that description if the people in it have had a genuine say in the process, not just the outcome. It is one of the projects I still think about when a new community-based commission comes in, as a useful check on whether I am actually handing over enough control, or just saying that I am.