About the Film

This invention documentary film follows artist and designer Dominic Wilcox during the early days of Little Inventors, an initiative he founded to turn young people’s invention drawings into real prototypes. Wilcox is known for inventive sculpture, speculative design and conceptual work that sits somewhere between the surreal and the genuinely useful, and Little Inventors channels that same spirit into a collaborative project built around imagination.

An Idea Given Room to Breathe

The premise is simple. Young people sketch their invention ideas, however strange or ambitious, and adult makers, engineers and artists take those drawings seriously enough to build them. It is part education, part play and part pure encouragement, and filming it meant spending time in classrooms, workshops and makerspaces full of curiosity, concentration and the quiet chaos of prototypes taking shape.

Filming in Classrooms and Makerspaces

I filmed mainly on a Panasonic GH4, which gave good colour and detail on the invention drawings and the prototypes as they came together, and used an iPhone for handheld, mobile moments such as young inventors presenting their ideas or makers soldering small components. Its compact size let me move around without disrupting the activity or drawing attention to any one participant. Lighting stayed natural and unobtrusive throughout, since the aim was for the film to feel like stepping into a real moment of excitement and concentration rather than something staged. Many of the most affecting moments happened simply because the camera waited, quietly, while an idea came to life for the first time.

Structuring the Story

The film follows the natural arc of the project: idea generation, sketching, prototyping and final presentation. Interviews with Dominic Wilcox provide the throughline, his reflections on imagination, design and the value of taking young people’s ideas seriously, set against footage of drawings, workshops and reactions, layered with light, ambient sound rather than anything heavily scored. Making an invention documentary film like this meant resisting the temptation to over-explain the process and trusting instead that the feeling of the thing, the joy and the hope in it, would carry more than a tidy explanation ever could.

Collaboration Across Generations

The film is as much a record of collaboration as of invention. Artists, engineers, teachers and young people all worked together, united mostly by curiosity. One of the more touching moments involved a retired engineer who volunteered his time to help bring a young inventor’s idea properly to life, a reminder that this kind of invention documentary film is not only about recording what happens but about giving weight to connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. Wilcox’s belief that every young person is an inventor came through as more than a slogan in the room, since none of the adults involved treated the ideas as a novelty. They took them seriously and built them properly, however unlikely they first seemed.

Why This Film Matters

Little Inventors makes a case for creativity being taken seriously in education, not as decoration but as a genuine way of thinking. This invention documentary film tries to show the thinking behind the inventions as much as the finished objects themselves, the confidence that builds when an idea is heard and acted on rather than gently dismissed. It shares that interest in creative process with other films I have made about arts and education, including Arts in Schools Documentary: Creative Schools and Creative Learning Through the Arts, and it remains one of the more purely joyful projects I have filmed, and one I still think back on when a new project involves working alongside young people.