There’s a stretch of the Newcastle Quayside I keep coming back to with a camera, or lately just a phone. The clip above is twenty seconds of it: BALTIC on one side, the Millennium Bridge curving over the water on the other, filmed handheld on an iPhone because that was what I had on me at the time. As a documentary filmmaker, this is exactly the kind of footage that goes straight into the archive rather than anywhere in particular.

That’s really the answer to the question in the title. I’m always filming because I don’t know in advance which twenty seconds will turn out to matter, and there’s no reliable way to guess. So instead of guessing, I just keep the camera close and let the archive decide later.

I’ve been building that archive since I went freelance in 2009, starting out in Barnard Castle with a Sony Z5 recording onto DV tape. Every camera since has added to it: a Panasonic AF101, then a GH2, GH4 and GH6, an iPhone from the very first generation through to whatever I’m carrying now, an Insta360, an Osmo Pocket 3. I’m due an upgrade in 2027, so there will be footage from cameras I haven’t bought yet sitting alongside the DV tapes. None of those cameras really matter individually. What matters is that none of it got thrown away.

A Documentary Filmmaker Footage Archive, in Hard Drives

That archive currently runs to 26 hard drives, and counting, everything backed up to the cloud through Backblaze. It isn’t a filing system I set out to build deliberately. It’s just what happens when you keep working across County Durham, Tyneside and Northumberland for the best part of two decades and rarely delete anything.

Have You Got Anything With X in It?

The reason it’s worth keeping, rather than just accumulating, is that people ask for it. It’s the kind of request that comes up more than you’d think: another filmmaker or an editor working on something collaborative, needing a specific place rather than a specific shot, and not having the time or budget to go and film it fresh.

I was partway through a collaborative edit recently when someone wanted a sense of the geographical breadth of County Durham, everything from the coast to the high ground. I had Blast Beach. I had an aerial shot of The Bowes Museum. I had atmospheric clips from the highest points in Teesdale. None of it was filmed for that project. It was just there, waiting.

Geotags and NeoFinder

Finding any of it depends on two things: geotagging everything as I go, and cataloguing the drives in NeoFinder, which lets me search the whole archive, including drives that aren’t even plugged in, by location, date or keyword. I’m not especially disciplined about most things, but I am about that: tag it, catalogue it, don’t rely on remembering where anything is a year later. It’s the difference between an archive and a pile of hard drives in a drawer.

When the Archive Becomes the Work

Most of it never gets used. But some of it does. The BALTIC building in this clip is there because of Flow, Ed Carter’s kinetic sound sculpture on the Tyne, which I filmed as a commission and which taught me to listen to the river as much as look at it.

A few miles up the Ouseburn, a very different project grew out of the same habit of paying attention to a stretch of water: Glitches in the Stream, a film poem made with New Writing North’s Cuckoo Young Writers and poet John Challis, filmed over two days and premiered at Live Theatre as part of Juice Festival. Both projects came from spending long enough in one place to notice something a passing visit wouldn’t.

None of that was the plan when I filmed this clip. It rarely is. I keep filming because a documentary filmmaker’s footage archive is only useful if it keeps growing, and because the next time someone asks if I’ve got anything with a particular bridge, building or stretch of coast in it, I’d rather be able to say yes.