The WOW Barn

When we say we like to work on female focussed stories, this one really took the crown! Working for Leeds2023 Year of Culture, Opal documented 300 women and non-binary people raising a barn in just 24 hours.

We parked our campervan on site and got stuck in, filming the hard work as shifts of people raised the barn. It’s a story of pride, power and resilience, making a comment on the fact that only 1% of people working in construction are female or non-binary.

Despite the rain (lots of rain!) and working through the night in full PPE, it was a joy to bring together an all female team to document this project.

As an extra bonus, everyone involved in this project was photographed by Lizzie Coombes who made cardboard cutouts of all the barn raisers and team to display around the site during WOW Women of the World celebrations in the barn.

“In my experience, it is rare that the atmosphere of a live event can be captured on film but Zoe and the team at Opal did a sensational job of embedding themselves into the project and preserving the essence of our wild act on camera.”