BUILDING IP FROM PLACE

Writer: Mark Anthony

Nidd Films

A producer’s perspective on place-based historical storytelling, original IP, and the value of building from landscape, memory, and lived history.

Producer note

Alongside the wider industry shifts currently taking place, another pattern has become increasingly clear to me over the past year: the value of stories rooted in place, historical depth, and strong character worlds.

Recent large-scale projects have reinforced that audiences continue to respond to work shaped by a clearly defined sense of place, emotionally grounded characters, and worlds that feel historically lived rather than generically constructed. What matters is not simply “period” or heritage on the surface, but the deeper relationship between landscape, memory, culture, and character.

That matters directly to the work I am building through Nidd Films.

Beyond “period storytelling”

It is easy to reduce historically grounded work to the label of period drama, but that misses where much of its real power lies.

The strongest projects do not simply place characters in the past. They create a world in which landscape shapes movement and experience, history informs emotional life, and character emerges from a specific cultural and geographical setting.

In those cases, place is not background. It is part of the narrative engine.

That is one of the clearest lessons I have taken from this year’s development work. The more I have worked through research, observation, framing, sound, and editing, the more evident it has become that narrative can grow from a landscape’s own structure and traces rather than being imposed onto it from outside.

What practice has clarified

A major part of my learning this year has been recognising that development does not begin only with plot. It can begin with location, atmosphere, historical research, movement through space, and an understanding of what a landscape has carried over time.

This has been central to the practice-led work behind The Valley: A Keeping, and also to the wider slate now in development through Nidd Films.

What has become clearer is that the stories I am drawn to do not need to be artificially stretched in search of meaning. That depth is already there — in the land, in the historical record, in routes, boundaries, labour, faith, memory, and in the people shaped by those forces.

As a producer, that has shifted my role. It becomes less about “finding” a marketable concept in abstraction, and more about recognising where narrative depth already exists and shaping it into work that is both authentic and strategically positionable.

Building original IP from real place

This is where original IP becomes especially important.

For me, the strongest material is not disconnected from its source. It grows from the specific realities of Nidderdale and the wider historical world of the Forest of Knaresborough. That gives the work historical depth, emotional truth, and a narrative continuity that can extend across more than one project.

In that sense, IP is not simply something invented. It can also be something revealed and developed through close attention to the region, its stories, and the lives embedded within it.

This has also sharpened my understanding of authorship and audience. When a story is rooted in real history and lived place, the producer’s role includes not only creative shaping, but also care, responsibility, and an awareness of what audiences connected to that place may recognise and respond to.

A wider slate, not isolated projects

One of the most valuable lessons of the past year has been the importance of thinking beyond a single title.

A film may stand on its own, but it can also sit within a broader narrative ecology: a wider slate in development where themes, landscapes, histories, and ways of seeing connect across projects. This creates a stronger foundation for IP because it allows work to build cumulatively rather than beginning from zero each time.

That does not mean repetition. It means coherence.

The projects I am developing through Nidd Films are connected not because they repeat the same story, but because they grow from the same historical and geographical ground. That gives them continuity, distinctiveness, and strategic value in a marketplace where originality increasingly depends on authenticity rather than volume.

What this means in the current industry

At a time when parts of the screen industry are becoming more consolidated and more risk-averse, there is real value in work that cannot be standardised easily.

Place-based historical storytelling offers exactly that: specific worlds rather than generic settings, characters shaped by real cultural memory, and narratives that carry both local truth and wider resonance.

For independent producers, this is not a weakness. It is an advantage.

Distinctive, regionally grounded work can travel when it is built with clarity, care, and a strong sense of audience. In that context, authenticity is not a niche quality. It is part of what gives a project long-term value.

At Nidd Films, that principle is central.

My work is increasingly focused on building and positioning original IP rooted in real history, landscape, and lineage — beginning in Nidderdale, but extending into the wider historical world of the Forest of Knaresborough. The aim is not to detach story from place, but to let story emerge from the place itself.

That means remaining faithful to historical and geographical truth, allowing the landscape to function as more than backdrop, and developing work whose emotional and narrative force already exists in the material.

This approach has been clarified through this year’s research, critical reflection, practical experimentation, and the gradual recognition that the land itself often contains the structure of the story.

Final thought

One of the strongest lessons I am taking forward is that narrative depth does not always need to be searched for elsewhere.

Sometimes it is already present: in the routes people walked, in the histories they left behind, in the communities that shaped the land, and in the landscapes that still carry those traces now.

For me, that is where the most powerful work begins.

And as a producer, that is increasingly the foundation on which I want to build.