Beautiful Landscape Cinematography: The Palace of Arts in Exhibition Park, Newcastle
This short landscape cinematography clip features The Palace of Arts in Exhibition Park, Newcastle and was filmed during one of my regular walks through the city.
It’s one of those quiet architectural landmarks that’s easy to overlook—particularly if you’re rushing through the park or heading straight for Wylam Brewery. Built in 1929 for the North East Coast Exhibition, it’s the last remaining building from that ambitious event, a legacy of civic pride and cultural optimism from between the wars.
Now home to Wylam Brewery, the building has been lovingly restored, but still retains the clean, symmetrical lines and slightly austere charm of its original design. The surrounding landscape—formal but softened by trees, hedges, and the boating lake—creates a particularly rich environment for observational filming.
It was captured in the late afternoon as the light began to settle into that muted, almost metallic tone that seems to flatten and deepen colours at the same time. The leafless trees made silhouettes against the pale sky, and the building appeared still—like it was listening. The water in the foreground was calm but animated by subtle movement, and a duck passed just as I finished the shot. Nothing dramatic happened. And that was the point.
These kinds of shots are part of an ongoing series I film while walking through Newcastle and Gateshead. I share them on my dedicated Instagram account: @newcastle_gateshead_landscapes. Each clip is usually no longer than 30 seconds and features a static or slowly moving frame—a moment observed rather than constructed. The aim is not to impress, but to notice.
For this type of work, I usually use an iPhone. It allows me to stay responsive to whatever I encounter. There’s no script, no plan, and no pre-production. I don’t scout locations. I simply film what stops me in my tracks. Often, it’s something quiet—an arrangement of shadows, a flash of unexpected colour, or the way a building sits in its surroundings.
I think of this as a form of landscape cinematography that’s rooted in sensitivity rather than scale. It’s not about grand vistas or dramatic drone shots. Instead, it focuses on texture, light, rhythm, and the relationship between human-built forms and natural elements. It’s a way of slowing down my gaze—and, I hope, the viewer’s too.
Filming places like Exhibition Park Newcastle helps me stay creatively active between commissioned projects. In the intensity of a larger documentary or client shoot, it’s easy to lose sight of that instinctive visual curiosity—the thing that got me into filmmaking in the first place. These short clips bring me back to that. They remind me that filming doesn’t always have to be about storytelling in the traditional sense. Sometimes, the frame is the story.
Over time, this series has become a visual diary of Newcastle and Gateshead—a quiet counterpoint to the louder, more defined narratives of the city. The clips show seasonal changes, shifts in atmosphere, and the interplay between architecture and weather. They’re not intended to be comprehensive or even representative. They’re just fragments—single-frame impressions of place.
The Palace of Arts is a particularly meaningful subject in that context. It represents a moment in time—a building designed to impress, and then almost forgotten. Its survival feels symbolic of how the city holds layers of history in plain sight, waiting to be re-seen. It’s a perfect subject for landscape cinematography that values stillness and attentiveness over action.
In a way, these videos function as miniature meditations. They’re a practice, a way of reconnecting with the act of seeing and the discipline of framing. And while they may be small in scale, they’re part of something bigger—a long-term engagement with Newcastle as a lived, walked, and quietly observed city.
You can watch more of my quiet, observational landscape shots—captured during walks through Newcastle and Gateshead—on my dedicated page here: https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/landscape/
You can also visit my Instagram →