About the Film

This event videography for arts projects follows a single day inside 10×10 Sunderland, a project pairing ten North East artists with ten Sunderland based businesses. Filmed at the North East Business and Innovation Centre in Sunderland on 26 April 2016, it looks at what happens when creative practice and commercial enterprise are put in the same room and asked to find some common ground.

What 10×10 Sunderland Set Out to Do

10×10 Sunderland grew out of research at the University of Sunderland into how artists and businesses might learn from each other. Ten pairs were brought together, most meeting face to face for the first time on the day of filming. Each pair had already been matched on the basis that their practices, or their problems, might have something useful to say to one another.

An Icebreaker and Two Lists of Words

The day opened simply. Each pair brought an object that stood for their own creative or business practice, something to talk around rather than talk at. Participants were then asked for three words they associated with business and three with artists. The business words tended toward suits, meetings and finance. The artist words tended toward creative, open and inquisitive. What came out of the discussion afterwards was more interesting than either list on its own: several of the business participants admired the flexibility associated with artists, while several artists wanted more credit for being structured and able to work to a brief.

What the Room Revealed

One business participant put it plainly:

“Money for us is about profit. But for many creatives, money is about buying time. That shift in value is something I hadn’t considered.”

Vocabulary kept overlapping through the day, enterprise, innovation, risk, with each side using the same words to mean slightly different things. It was often in that gap, rather than in the agreement, that the more useful conversations happened. One artist reflected:

“I’ve had businesses say they’re already rethinking how they do certain things, just from one conversation.”

Some pairs moved into hands on sessions, artists helping businesses try tools or rethink how they told their own story, and at least one pairing that had planned a visual artwork ended up working towards a piece of theatre instead, a pivot that grew directly out of the conversation rather than the original brief.

Filming as a Videographer in Sunderland

As a videographer in Sunderland working on a day like this, the job is mostly about staying out of the way. There is no script and no staged presentation to fall back on, just a room full of people working something out in real time. Most of the filming was handheld and close, following conversations rather than setting them up, so that the hesitations and the small changes of mind stayed in the footage rather than being tidied away.

A Day Worth Documenting

Towards the end of the workshop, one participant summed up the day rather than the outcome:

“It’s a joint sensation with people, even if you don’t know what you’ll get, the process itself is already valuable.”

That is close to the point of this kind of event videography for arts projects. The value was not in a polished pitch or a finished piece of work, but in the process itself, in giving ten unlikely pairings a few hours to see what might come of putting creative and commercial thinking in the same room.