Whose Story Is It Anyway? On Preserving the Voice of Your Documentary Subjects

I’ve been making documentary films for nearly two decades. In that time I’ve sat across from miners who wept recalling 1984, drag artists who talked about identity with more clarity than most politicians manage in a career, and a duathlete from South Yorkshire who turned grief into endurance. Every single one of them had a story worth telling. My job — and this is something I genuinely believe — was never to tell it for them.

Every building, stage, or public space has a story, but most of the time it fades into the background. Projection mapping changes that. Instead of adding a screen or a banner, you use light, movement, and sound to turn the space itself into the canvas, whether that’s a theatre façade, a gallery wall, or a city landmark.