Cheshire Archives wanted a set of short explainer films to support their school workshop programme, giving young visitors a friendly introduction to the kinds of primary sources they'd be working with in the sessions.

We made three films, each fronted by one of the archive's own staff. Kate explains what a school logbook is and why they matter as a historical record. Adam walks through how to read a census, taking a real example and breaking down each column in plain language. And Becky introduces Tudor inventories, using original documents from the collection to show what they can tell us about the people who owned them.

The films were scripted to feel like a conversation rather than a lesson, with the archivists talking directly to the children and plenty of moments built around actual documents from the collection. Each one was designed to sit alongside a workshop activity, so the children arrived at the documents already knowing what they were looking at.