What they needed

Creative Places Darndale works to promote the arts in the area and to support artists living in Darndale, Clonshaugh, Priorswood, Belcamp, and Moatview. The programme is run by Northside Partnership and supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council Arts Office.

Creative Places is a three-year initiative that invests in places that have historically had fewer opportunities to engage with the arts. From the outset, it was clear that this was not a project that could be captured in a single moment — its impact would unfold gradually, through sustained activity, relationships, and participation over time.

They wanted this process to be documented in a way that reflected both the breadth of activity and the longer-term effects of the programme within the community.

What we did

This project is a good example of the kind of long-term work we value. Over the three-year duration of Creative Places Darndale, we documented a wide range of projects and events, returning regularly to capture how the programme developed year by year.

Each year, we produced a short round-up film that reflected on what had taken place and highlighted key moments and outcomes. Alongside this, we developed a longer documentary that followed the programme over time, allowing space for progress, relationships, and confidence to emerge naturally.

This meant checking in consistently — sometimes returning to the same individuals and artists across multiple projects, other times documenting the steady flow of children and participants engaging with different activities for the first time. What interested us most was not just the events themselves, but the accumulation of moments: how familiarity grew, how participation deepened, and how the presence of the arts became embedded in everyday life.

By staying with the project over time, we were able to move beyond a snapshot and instead capture a sense of continuity, care, and long-term change — something that can only really be understood by being there, again and again.