“It made our eyes get bigger”: youth filmmaking and place-making in East London

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in London, this article describes how participatory youth filmmaking projects act as a deliberate intervention into young people's experiences of place and space. I propose that filmmaking can be understood as a means for young people to reconstruct and reimagine both familiar and unfamiliar spaces by utilizing the specific sensorial affordances of filmmaking. Acknowledging that producing a film is not only a technical but also a social, creative, and embodied process, I discuss how filmmaking mediates young people's experiences and invites them to experience a heightened perceptual attention to their surroundings by creating new forms of “sensing place.”