About the Film

This young filmmakers documentary film follows a project made with pupils from three Northumberland schools, working alongside Northumberland Wildlife Trust on their Restoring Ratty water vole project. Rather than filming the story myself, I taught the students the basics of filmmaking and handed over the cameras, letting them make the film themselves.

The Restoring Ratty Project

Restoring Ratty is a Northumberland Wildlife Trust project run in partnership with Forestry England and Tyne Rivers Trust, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Launched in 2017, it set out to bring water voles back to Kielder Forest and the wider Tyne catchment, a species that has lost over 90 per cent of its UK population since the 1970s to habitat loss and predation by invasive American mink. Alongside sustained mink control and community engagement, the project has restored hundreds of kilometres of riverside habitat and released thousands of captive bred water voles at carefully chosen sites across Kielder.

Handing Over the Camera

In 2017 the Trust invited me to help document part of this work. Instead of filming it myself, we decided the students should tell the story in their own words. After a short crash course in filming and sound, pupils from three schools went out with iPods and basic sound equipment and made the film you see here.

What the Young Filmmakers Found

Their enthusiasm is there in almost every frame. One student can barely contain herself before the day has even properly begun:

“We’re on a trip. Think this is going to be the best day ever? I can feel it.”

Others were more focused on what the day was actually for, and why it mattered:

“It’s a good thing that we’re helping the environment by releasing the water voles.”

The film ends on the moment several of them had clearly been waiting for all day, watching a water vole disappear back into the undergrowth:

“We feel very happy when releasing a new animal into the wild. There he goes, watch him go!”

Editing Together

The film was edited jointly between me and the Restoring Ratty team, who checked the conservation detail while I tried to keep the pace and energy of the students’ own footage intact, rather than smoothing it into something more conventional.

A Model Worth Repeating

Projects like this are among the ones I am proudest of. The value was not in producing a polished piece to a brief, but in stepping back and letting a group of young people become the ones actually telling the story of a conservation project happening on their doorstep. Restoring Ratty continues to release water voles into Kielder each year, and this small film remains a record of one group of students’ first real go at being filmmakers themselves.