We believe that film-elicitation provides insights and understanding that otherwise might be missed or not recognizable by other methods. It gives the opportunity to gain not just more, but different insight into social phenomena. Introducing imagery in dialogue might provoke a chain of reactions from the participants because imagery exercise agency causing people to see things in a new way. People construct and reconstruct shared memories through imagery.

In Snøhetta we followed a team of architects with a camera from start to end in a conceptual competition on their regular meetings, collected film sequences that displayed good idea work and watched these sequences with the team. After the session, one of the lead architects summarized it like this: ‘When someone observe what you are doing, and tell you about the observations afterwards, you feel that you are seen; and that is both satisfying and enjoyable.’