A documentary capturing Tonga’s recovery after the 2022 eruption and tsunami.

Mude produces an impact documentary in a clear sequence, and its film for the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) followed it from end to end.

1. Run a discovery session and creative brief that set the messaging pillars, the audience, and the narrative framework the film will follow.
2. Map the perspectives the story needs, then plan the interviews, locations and shoot schedule in pre-production.
3. Travel to location and capture the interviews and footage, so the film is carried by the voices of the people in the story.
4. Edit, colour grade and finish the film in-house, including sound, subtitles and the delivery formats each audience needs.

For the SPREP documentary on the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, that meant a Sydney-based team flying to Tonga to film interviews and on-location footage, then bringing the edit, grade and sound back to the studio in Glebe. The result was a 30-minute documentary that premiered at the SPREP workshop in December 2022 and went on to win eight Telly Awards. Most of the work that shaped the film happened in the brief and the planning, before the shoot.

Documentary film production usually takes several months from the first brief to final delivery, and most of that time goes into pre-production and post-production, with the shoot itself a smaller block. The schedule depends on the scale of the story, how much travel the shoot involves, how many interviews are needed, and how much archival material has to be sourced and cleared.

Mude’s documentary for SPREP shows where the time goes on a project like this. Pre-production covered the creative brief, the narrative framework, perspective mapping for interviewees, location scoping and shoot scheduling before the team travelled to Tonga. The filming itself was an on-location block of interviews and B-roll. Post-production then carried the bulk of the work, including the edit, colour grade, sound design, subtitles for international audiences, and two delivery cuts, one sized for the SPREP workshop screen and a master for YouTube. A realistic documentary timeline counts all three stages, from the brief through to the final delivery cuts.

Pre-production is where a documentary is designed before anything is filmed, and it decides whether the footage from the shoot will add up to a coherent film. For Mude, it starts with a discovery session and a creative brief that work through the messaging pillars, the audience, the perspectives the story needs, and the narrative framework that will carry the film.

On the SPREP documentary, that pre-production stage mapped the people the film needed to hear from, scoped the locations in Tonga, and set the shoot schedule before the team left Sydney. The perspective mapping was central, because the story had to hold four points of view at once: the public who lived through the eruption, the government and emergency services who coordinated the response, the local NGOs and waste authorities who led the cleanup, and the international partners who arrived with aid. With that structure settled in advance, a single shoot in Tonga could capture everything the edit would later need.

Documentaries often have to build a single film from footage captured in very different ways, and the craft sits in making those sources feel like one piece. Mude’s SPREP documentary is a clear example, because the actual eruption and tsunami were filmed by Tongans on their mobile phones in the seconds and minutes after the first blast, which is the only footage of the event that exists, since no professional crew was on the ground.

The finished film integrates several material sources around that footage. It combines the team’s own cinematography shot on location in Tonga, the mobile phone footage of the event itself, broadcast material licensed from local Tongan television, and the satellite imagery that let the rest of the world see the scale of the eruption in real time. The work in post-production is to grade, pace and place these so the join is invisible and the audience stays inside the story. On a film like this, that found footage is the only record of the event itself, so bringing it in cleanly is central to the work.

Music and sound design in a documentary carry the emotional register of the film and hold the audience inside the story, and on a serious documentary the score usually works best when it stays quiet enough to let the material lead. The aim is for the music to support the interviews and footage without competing with them for attention.

On Mude’s SPREP documentary, the score was understated by design, because the story of the eruption and the recovery was strong enough to carry the film on its own. The brief on the music called for something multi-genred, drawing on both real and digital instruments, and timeless enough that it would not date the film as it moved through SPREP’s training rotation over the years ahead. Sound was finished in-house alongside the edit and grade. On a documentary built to be useful for a long time, a restrained score is part of keeping it watchable years after it was made.

Mude approaches a film for a government body or an NGO as a piece of real storytelling first, so it does not read as a standard institutional video. The conventions of a typical government or training film, the safe tone and the sanitised account, tend to lose exactly the audience the film is meant to reach.

The SPREP documentary was made on that basis. SPREP did not want a piece that played safe, so the agreed tone was honest and direct, prepared to be critical where the disaster response had fallen short, without judging the people doing the work. The reasoning was practical: the audience is people doing similar work in similar conditions, and they would see through a sanitised version immediately. The visual direction avoided the look of a standard government training video while keeping the film legible as a serious piece of information. Because the film was honest, the government and emergency teams it was built for took it seriously.

Cross-cultural documentary production means making a film in a community that is not your own, which calls for working closely with local people so that their perspective shapes the story. The footage, the voices and the framing all have to come from inside the community for the film to be accurate and respectful.

Mude’s SPREP documentary was made this way in Tonga. The account of the event itself came from footage Tongans filmed on their own phones, the story was carried by interviews with Tongan residents, government officials, local NGOs, community leaders and church figures, and broadcast material was licensed from local Tongan television. The film also recognised the role of the church and the community in holding things together when official systems were overwhelmed, which is central to how Tongans themselves describe the response. Built from local voices, the film speaks credibly to a Pacific audience.

The 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption was the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on 15 January 2022, which scientists later described as a once-in-a-thousand-year event for this type of volcano. The blast was visible from space and registered around the world, and within about an hour a tsunami had reached Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu.

The event was dangerous in an unusual way because Tonga’s disaster planning was built around tsunamis triggered by earthquakes, which come with warning time and a seismic signal. The eruption produced a tsunami with none of that warning, so for people on the ground the eruption, the shaking, the sky going black with ash and the arrival of the wave collapsed almost into a single moment. Three people died, coastal homes were destroyed, and Tonga’s single underwater fibre optic cable was severed, which cut almost all communication with the outside world. Volcanic ash contaminated drinking water that mostly comes from rainwater catchment, and the airport runway was unusable for a week. Mude’s documentary for SPREP records this event through the people who lived through it and the teams who responded.

Tonga’s response to the 2022 eruption succeeded in spite of significant gaps, and the honest assessment from the people in Mude’s SPREP documentary is that the country was also fortunate the event was not larger. The response worked because communities, churches, local NGOs and emergency teams moved quickly, and because international partners arrived with equipment that did not exist in Tonga at the time.

The gaps were real. Tonga had no equipment suited to clearing volcanic ash or bulky tsunami debris, and its disaster doctrine had not planned for a tsunami without an earthquake warning, so much of the early response relied on manual workarounds. Since then, Tonga has installed sirens that are tested every Friday and has rebuilt its disaster planning to assume tsunamis can come from any source, including volcanic ones. The documentary also makes the case for more evacuation centres, better disability access in those centres, and a shared disaster waste management plan that agencies, contractors and communities can work to in advance. The film is built to pass those lessons to other Pacific nations facing similar risks.

Impact films are usually commissioned by organisations whose goal is to inform and prepare an audience, including NGOs, not-for-profits, government bodies, regional agencies and funders. They turn to film because a documentary can carry a complex issue more vividly than a written report, and because real voices and real footage build trust in a way text often cannot.

Mude’s SPREP documentary is a clear case. It was commissioned by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, funded by the European Union, and made to serve disaster preparedness training for government teams, NGOs and emergency services across the Pacific. The commission existed because SPREP needed its audience to understand a specific event in depth and apply its lessons to their own planning, which is the kind of job an impact film is built for. It is a clear example of impact storytelling, where a real event becomes a resource an audience can learn from.

An impact film is a documentary or short film made to change what an audience understands or does about a real issue. It is a form of impact storytelling, built around real people and real events, and it is usually commissioned by an organisation with a mission, such as an NGO, a government body or a funder.

The difference from a corporate or brand video sits in the job it has to do. A brand video exists to support a company’s commercial goals and carry its identity. An impact film is commissioned to shift what an audience knows or does about an issue, and its success is judged on whether that shift happens. Mude’s documentary for SPREP is an example. It was European Union funded, made for a regional environment agency, and built as a training reference for government teams, NGOs and emergency services across the Pacific. The film was made to leave that audience more prepared for the next disaster, which is why it was shot as an honest account of what happened.

The cost of a documentary is driven by a handful of factors more than by any single line item. Travel and location are usually the largest variable, since flying a crew to a remote location and working there costs more than filming close to home. The number and spread of interviews matters, because each subject adds scheduling, filming and edit time. Archival and licensed material adds cost where a story needs footage the crew could not capture. Post-production is a major share of the budget on most video production, covering the edit, colour grade, sound and any subtitling or versioning.

Mude’s SPREP documentary carried most of these. A Sydney-based team travelled to Tonga to film, the story drew on interviews across the public, government, NGO and international response, and post-production integrated mobile phone footage from Tongans, broadcast material licensed from local Tongan television, and satellite imagery alongside the team’s own cinematography. The most useful way to budget a documentary is to scope those drivers against the story before committing to a number.

Mude structures a documentary’s interviews around the perspectives the story needs, which is decided in pre-production through a process it calls perspective mapping. The interviews are planned so that each one covers a distinct part of the story and the voices together build a complete account.

The SPREP documentary shows how that works in practice. It was built on interviews across four sides of the 2022 disaster response: members of the public who lived through the eruption and tsunami, the government and emergency services teams who coordinated the response, including the National Emergency Management Office and the Tonga Waste Authority, the local NGOs and community leaders who led the Nuku’alofa cleanup, and the international partners from the Australian and New Zealand defence forces who arrived with equipment Tonga did not have. With the interviews planned across those four groups, the finished film carries the whole story, from the first moments of the eruption through to the long cleanup.

Post-production on a documentary is everything that turns the filmed material into a finished film, and on an interview-led documentary it carries most of the creative work. It covers the edit that finds the story in the footage, the colour grade that gives the film a consistent look, sound design and mix, any subtitles, and the final delivery in the formats each audience needs.

Mude handled all of this in-house on its SPREP documentary. The edit shaped hours of interviews and B-roll into a 30-minute film, the grade and sound carried a story filmed largely outdoors in natural light, subtitles were prepared for international audiences across the Pacific, and the film was delivered as two cuts, one sized for the SPREP workshop screen and a master for YouTube. Because the documentary draws on found footage and licensed material as well as original cinematography, post-production was also where those sources were brought into one consistent piece.

Filming a documentary on location in a remote place takes a production built to work with limited infrastructure and to capture a story honestly in the conditions on the ground. It calls for careful planning around travel, access and scheduling, and a visual approach that suits real settings.

Mude produced its SPREP documentary from its studio in Glebe, Sydney, with the team travelling to Tonga for the on-location cinematography. Most of the interviews were filmed outdoors in natural light, in keeping with the boots-on-the-ground visual language agreed with SPREP, and the filming mixed sit-down interviews with walk-and-talk sequences and B-roll of the locations themselves, including coastal cemeteries, evacuation centres, the wharf, the airport runway and the Tonga Waste Authority’s landfill. Filming on location keeps the documentary grounded in the place the story happened, which matters when the audience is people who live and work in similar conditions.

Telling a traumatic story on film is the hardest part of impact storytelling, and it means holding two responsibilities at once: being honest about what happened, and treating the people who lived through it with care. Mude’s approach is to let the people in the story speak for themselves and to build the film around their accounts, so the audience hears the events from the people who were there.

The SPREP documentary covers a disaster in which three people died, homes along the coast were destroyed, and families collected the remains of relatives from cemeteries torn open by the wave. Mude built the film around interviews with the public, emergency teams, local NGOs and international partners, and let those first-hand accounts carry the hardest parts of the story. The people who lived through the disaster describe it in their own words, which keeps the film truthful to their experience.

A documentary works as a training resource when it does more than record what happened and draws out clear, transferable lessons an audience can act on. That means structuring the film around the decisions and the gaps that other people in the same position need to understand, so the story teaches as it unfolds.

Mude’s SPREP documentary was commissioned for exactly this purpose. It was made as a training reference for government teams, NGOs and emergency services across the Pacific, with the brief that the audience should walk away better prepared for the next disaster of its kind. The film was built around a guiding question from its working title, whether the region is prepared for future disasters, and its focus on disaster waste management drew out the practical connections, such as why volcanic ash on a runway stops aid planes landing and why packaging from incoming aid creates a waste problem of its own. It premiered at the SPREP workshop in December 2022 and now sits in SPREP’s library, where Pacific teams return to it when they plan for future disasters.

Disaster waste management is the work of dealing with the waste a disaster creates, from building debris and hazardous material to the packaging of incoming aid, and it is often the connecting thread between the other problems in a disaster response. Mude’s SPREP documentary made this its central focus, because waste touches almost every friction point in an event like the Hunga Tonga eruption.

Tonga showed why it matters. Volcanic ash on the runway stopped aid planes landing, ash in the harbour stopped relief ships docking, and asbestos in the debris from damaged buildings became a hazard for the workers handling the cleanup. Plastic and packaging from incoming aid created a fresh waste problem on the way to solving an immediate one. During the cleanup, an equivalent of three tonnes of compacted plastic litter was collected in two days from across Tongatapu and shipped out on the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Canberra, and landfill input rose by 32 percent across the first three months. The documentary draws these connections out so that other Pacific nations can plan for them ahead of the next disaster.

A documentary like this stays useful because it does two things that outlast the news cycle: it preserves a first-hand record of an event, and it carries practical lessons the next response can use. Once the immediate coverage of a disaster fades, a well-made film becomes both an archive and a training tool.

Mude’s SPREP documentary serves both roles. It is a public record of the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, an event that on the scientific account the region will not see again for many lifetimes, captured through the people who lived it and the only footage that exists of the eruption itself. It is also a working reference, sitting in SPREP’s library and moving through the organisation’s disaster preparedness training across the Pacific. The film was made to be timeless in its look and sound, so it stays usable as SPREP runs it through training in the years ahead.

Mude is a Sydney and Canberra creative agency and video production company, with a body of documentary film production and impact films made for NGOs, government bodies and regional agencies. Its documentary for the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, on Tonga’s recovery after the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, was funded by the European Union and has won eight Telly Awards.

That film sits alongside video, brand and digital work for organisations including Amnesty International, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Australian Medical Council, the Y and AFPA, across the not-for-profit, government and policy sectors. The common thread is purpose-driven storytelling made to a professional standard for organisations that need to inform a real audience. The Tonga documentary is one part of that wider body of impact and social-purpose film work.