Bristol Pride Festival

Festival documentation, live event filmmaking, and participatory storytelling I have worked with Bristol Pride across several years, filming performances, community events, and interviews throughout the festival programme. The work sits somewhere between event documentation and documentary practice, combining large-scale stage coverage with small, unscripted conversations with the people who make Pride what it is.

The challenge with Pride is that it exists at multiple scales at once.

There is the public event: march, stages, crowds, speeches, celebration.

And there are individual stories happening inside it, often shared quickly, emotionally, and in very public space.

My role has been to film in a way that can hold both.

Production usually involves full-day coverage across multiple locations, working with multi-camera setups, drone shots where permitted, and on-the-ground interviews with attendees, volunteers, performers, and organisers. Alongside the performance footage, a central part of the work is recording short, unscripted reflections on what Pride means to people now, rather than relying on prepared statements or promotional messaging.

Edits are often turned around during the festival itself, as well as afterwards for archive, social, and funding use. This means working with fast ingest and assembly workflows while keeping a consistent visual language across very different environments.

Over time the project has also become part of a wider research process in my filmmaking practice, looking at how participatory documentary can be done responsibly in live public settings. Pride creates spaces where identity, politics, celebration, and vulnerability all exist at once, and filming in those spaces requires care as much as speed.

The intention is not only to show what the event looked like, but to create films that feel truthful to the people inside it.