Who Gets to Tell the Story? Co-Producing Digital Meaning in Museums

How the Great North Museum: Hancock and Beacon Films are reshaping what museum interpretation can look like — and who gets to make it.

What happens when you stop asking disabled and neurodivergent people to simply visit your museum, and start inviting them to interpret it?

That question sits at the heart of an ongoing collaboration between the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle and Beacon Films, a production company supporting disabled and neurodivergent filmmakers. Presented at the Museum Digital Summit 2026, the session offered a candid, inspiring look at a partnership that is quietly changing how one museum thinks about stories, spaces and creative authority.

Starting with Trust

The Great North Museum: Hancock is nearly 150 years old. Its collections span archaeology, natural history and world cultures. It is, in short, full of stories — most of them told by the institution itself.

Beacon Films, which has been operating for around 15 to 20 years, works differently. Its model places creative decision-making firmly in the hands of its filmmakers. When the two organisations first worked together on a project set in the museum’s planetarium, something clicked. A shared trust formed that has since grown into a multi-strand partnership.
“There’s a lot of trust between the two organisations,” says Andrew Coats, Creative Director at Beacon Films. “They trust us to create interesting artworks. We trust them to display it and show people.”

That mutual trust, though easy to state, is harder to build and easier to underestimate. It is also, both parties suggest, the whole point.

Handing Over the Brief

The project’s most recent phase involves two groups of Beacon Films creatives working with the museum in distinct but connected ways.

The first is a showcase group — participants who work together to develop a creative brief, defining what they want the project to make and why. The second is a creative group who respond to that brief. Crucially, people can be members of both. The structure was designed so that filmmakers aren’t just executing someone else’s vision — they’re shaping the questions before they pick up a camera.

“Everything came from them,” says Coats.

The initial brief for the first cohort asked filmmakers to walk through the museum and respond to it — imagining, in Coats’s words, “the wind of history blowing over you” and doorways opening onto new worlds. What emerged was a series of short films as varied as the people who made them.

One filmmaker discovered something in the gift shop worth documenting. Another imagined the museum lift opening onto a Jurassic landscape. A third responded to the giant spider crab in the natural history collection by creating a sci-fi creature that fired lasers from its eyes.

These aren’t quirky footnotes to the museum’s existing interpretation. They are the interpretation — or at least a meaningful strand of it, installed in the centre of the building where visitors encounter it as they move through the space.

Whose Stories Get Told?

One of the most affecting pieces to emerge from the collaboration is a short film about Mary Jane Hancock — sister to the museum’s founding brothers, John and Albany.

The film, wryly written and performed, makes a simple but pointed observation: John stuffed birds, Albany studied sea slugs, and Mary Jane kept house and painted watercolours. The museum bears the Hancock name, but whose story has it been telling?

“What about me? It’s me, Mary Jane. Don’t forget your sister,” the character repeats, as the narrator edges her back into the frame she keeps slipping out of.

It’s a light touch with serious intent. As Michelle Fox, Programme Director at Beacon Films, puts it: “Exhibitions don’t necessarily represent disabled people throughout history.” The same might be said of women, of those whose contributions were domestic or uncelebrated. Co-production, in this context, isn’t just an access initiative. It’s an editorial one.

Another film reimagines Sparky — a real budgerigar from Fawdon in Newcastle, apparently capable of over 500 words — as a loquacious, tender portrait of an animal and the aunt who loved him. It’s funny, strange and genuinely moving. It is also, clearly, not the kind of film the museum would have commissioned on its own.

Going Even Further: Virtual Visionaries

Some of the most significant work in this partnership has taken place not with filmmakers, but with students with profound and multiple learning difficulties — young people who may be non-verbal or have very limited mobility.

In the Virtual Visionaries project, Beacon Films developed a bespoke process: filming footage, showing it to students, observing their reactions, and building films from what they responded to. The resulting installation included a projection on the back wall and a circular projection on the floor — the latter not initially designed to be interactive, but immediately becoming so.

“When kids were watching it in the museum,” Coats recalls, “every time the ball hit the camera, they would all fall over, then get up again.” Interaction that nobody planned for, born from the simple fact of projection being placed at floor level.
The students came to see their work on display. The museum created information panels about each of them. Their creativity was treated seriously, documented carefully, and shown to the public.

“It was just a really inclusive way to create art,” says Coats. “It was great. Really, really good.”

A Placement, Not Just a Project

Beyond the group work, the partnership has also piloted a filmmaker placement within the museum — a formally advertised position, with a real interview process, offering a neurodivergent filmmaker the chance to develop an area of expertise in museum and cultural documentation.

Fox is clear about the professional stakes: “Within the screen industry, we’re providing an opportunity for filmmakers to make a living. Not everybody will work on a feature film or in television, but there’s lots of work out there — specifically for places like museums — which focus on documenting experiences or collections. That’s a real job opportunity.”
The placement comes with goals mentoring — breaking down ambitions into achievable steps — as well as equipment, training and the backing of Beacon Films throughout.

“I think it shows that we’re taking them seriously as filmmakers,” says Fox, “but also valuing the talent that they bring to the table.”

What Museums Can Take From This

Kate Holden, Learning Officer at the Great North Museum: Hancock, is reflective about what working this way has changed for her.

“Working with those young people makes me question my practice,” she says. “How they get access to what we do, the way in which they experience the building. Because it’s not a one-off — it’s something where I’m meeting these people lots of different times. That’s really helped me to think about how that works.”

This is perhaps the most important point for any museum considering similar work. Co-production is not a programme. It’s a relationship, and relationships change the people in them.

The practical takeaways from this collaboration are real and replicable: building a structure that separates brief-setting from making (while allowing people to participate in both); piloting formal placements with proper support infrastructure; trusting creative partners to decide where the cameras point; and installing the results somewhere visible, not tucked away.

But the deeper shift is harder to systematise: learning to genuinely give up interpretive control, and discovering — perhaps with some surprise — that what comes back is more interesting than what you’d have commissioned yourself.
“Our filmmakers have really appreciated the time and the challenge to go and find things within that space,” says Coats. “You could wander around that museum for weeks and not see everything there is to offer.”

Disabled and neurodivergent creatives have been wandering through museums for years. This project is about what happens when you hand them a camera and actually listen to what they find.

The work produced through the Great North Museum: Hancock and Beacon Films partnership can be viewed online via the museum’s website and at beaconfilms.org.uk. If you’re in the Northeast, the installations are on display in the museum itself.

So What Heritage is funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund. Virtual Visionaries was funded by Arts Council England and Sir James Knott Trust.

This post is based on a presentation by Kate Holden from the Great North Museum and Zosia Feher and Andrew Coats from Beacon Films delivered at the Museum Digital Summit 2026.