Industrial & Product Design
Objectified (2009) — Documentary
Director: Gary Hustwit
A look at the designers behind the manufactured objects we use every day, from toothbrushes and kitchen tools to furniture, the iPhone, and the MacBook Air. The film includes conversations with influential designers such as Dieter Rams, Naoto Fukasawa, and Apple’s Jony Ive.
What you’ll learn: Why the best-designed objects often disappear into daily life. The film reveals how many decisions about form, materials, manufacturing, and human behaviour sit inside something that feels obvious once it works.
Rams (2018) — Documentary
Director: Gary Hustwit
A portrait of Dieter Rams, the designer responsible for shaping Braun’s influential product language and the principles that inspired generations of designers—including Apple’s design team.
What you’ll learn: How Rams approached making products simpler, clearer, and easier to live with. The film also explores his unease about consumerism and what happened when his restrained design philosophy became one of the most copied in the world.
The Genius of Design (2010) — Documentary Series, BBC
Narrator: Denis Lawson
Across five episodes, the series traces the development of industrial design from the Industrial Revolution to contemporary products. Designers including Dieter Rams, J Mays, and Jony Ive discuss the objects and ideas that shaped the modern world.
What you’ll learn: How materials, manufacturing, technology, and changing human habits influence the things we use every day. It places familiar products within a much larger history of industry and design.
General Magic (2018) — Documentary
Directors: Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude
In the early 1990s, a team of designers and engineers who emerged from Apple attempted to create a handheld, connected device years before the smartphone market existed. The company failed, but members of its team—including Tony Fadell—later helped create the iPod, iPhone, Android, and other defining technologies.
What you’ll learn: Why having a visionary product is not enough if the technology, market, and audience are not ready. It is a particularly good study of experimentation, timing, product development, and how an apparent failure can influence an entire industry. Apple TV
Chair Times: A History of Seating (2018) — Documentary
Director: Heinz Bütler
Using 125 chairs from the Vitra Design Museum, the film traces the history of seating from the early nineteenth century to the present day.
What you’ll learn: How changes in materials, manufacturing, technology, and everyday life influence the objects around us. By focusing on one familiar object, the film reveals how much cultural and technical history can be contained in a single design.
The New Bauhaus (2019) — Documentary
Director: Alysa Nahmias
The story of László Moholy-Nagy and his attempt to bring Bauhaus thinking to Chicago by establishing a school that connected art, design, technology, and industry.
What you’ll learn: How experimentation across disciplines can shape a new approach to design education. The film also explores what happens when an ambitious creative philosophy must adapt to a different city, culture, and economic reality.
The Toys That Made Us (2017–) — Documentary Series, Netflix
Creator: Brian Volk-Weiss
Each episode explores the history of a recognisable toy franchise, following its journey from an early idea through design, manufacturing, marketing, and cultural success.
What you’ll learn: How products become part of popular culture through design, storytelling, timing, nostalgia, and commercial strategy. It also shows how production costs, licensing agreements, and audience expectations shape the finished product.
A Watchlist for the Creatively Curious: Films, Tv Series, and Documentaries
Watching someone else's process is sometimes the fastest way to understand your own. A list of films, series, and documentaries worth adding to your watchlist.
Music Production
A lot of creative education happens sideways: watching someone else wrestle with an idea, make the wrong call, change direction and find a way through. If you can't stop wondering "What actually goes on behind the scenes at a record label?" or "How does a director get a performance out of an actor?", we've put together a list you can always return to for your next watch.
Classic Albums (1997–) — Series, BBC/Eagle Rock
Various directors
Each episode explores how a landmark album was made, from The Dark Side of the Moon and Nevermind to Thriller. The artists and producers revisit the original recordings, break down individual songs, and share the stories and creative decisions behind them.
What you’ll learn: You start hearing records differently once someone solos the drums, strips out the vocal, or shows you the tiny part doing far more work than you realised. It’s a good look at how much of a song’s character comes from arrangement, recording and mixing, not just the writing.
Sound City (2013) — Documentary
Director: Dave Grohl
Dave Grohl tells the story of Sound City, the slightly battered Los Angeles studio where albums including Nevermind, Rumours and After the Gold Rush were recorded.
What you’ll learn: Mostly, why musicians can become strangely attached to rooms, consoles and equipment that are inconvenient by modern standards. The film gets into the accidents, limitations and bits of friction that can give a recording its personality, especially when the easier option would be to clean everything up.
Quincy (2018) — Documentary, Netflix
Directors: Rashida Jones, Alan Hicks
A portrait of Quincy Jones that follows him through jazz, film scoring, television, and pop, including his work producing Thriller.
What you’ll learn: How someone can move between completely different kinds of music without flattening them into the same sound. Jones is interesting because his range wasn’t just about liking lots of genres. He knew how to understand the people, musicians, and rules of each one, then work inside them.
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Song Exploder (2020–) — Documentary Series, Netflix
Creator: Hrishikesh Hirway
Each episode features a different artist breaking down one of their songs and explaining how it developed from an initial idea into a finished recording. Featured artists include Dua Lipa, Alicia Keys, R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails, and The Killers.
What you’ll learn: How songwriting, arrangement, production, sampling, and personal experience come together inside a single track. By isolating individual sounds and revisiting early versions, the series reveals how small creative decisions can completely change the character of a song.
Filmmaking
Side by Side (2012) — Documentary
Director: Christopher Kenneally
Keanu Reeves speaks with filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, and George Lucas about cinema’s transition from photochemical film to digital production.
What you’ll learn: How the choice between film and digital affects cinematography, performance, editing, archiving, and the atmosphere on set. It also reveals how new technology changes creative possibilities while making older forms of craft increasingly difficult to preserve.
The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004) — Documentary
Director: Wendy Apple
Editors and directors—including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin
Tarantino, and Walter Murch—explore the history and invisible craft of film editing.
What you’ll learn: How the placement of a single cut can control rhythm, emotion, tension, time, and performance. The film shows that editing is not simply assembling footage; it is often where the final story is discovered.
The Studio (2025–) — Comedy Series, Apple TV+
Creators: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez
Seth Rogen plays the newly appointed head of a struggling Hollywood studio, where every attempt to support good filmmaking becomes tangled in celebrity egos, corporate demands, marketing concerns, and commercial pressure.
What you’ll learn: Through satire, the series shows how many competing interests surround a film before it reaches an audience. It explores the tension between creative ambition and business, and how executives, directors, actors, brands, and awards campaigns can reshape the original idea.
Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) — Animated Series
Creators: Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski
The series reimagines Gotham as a timeless world shaped by 1940s film noir, Art Deco architecture, gothic shadows, and modern technology. Its distinctive visual language became known as “Dark Deco.”
What you’ll learn: How art direction can define the mood and identity of an entire fictional world. To achieve its unusually dark atmosphere, the production team painted light colours onto black backgrounds—reversing the standard animation process of painting dark colours onto white. The result demonstrates how one technical choice can shape lighting, colour, architecture, and storytelling across a complete series.
Advertising, Branding & Creative Culture
The Pitch (2012–2013) — Series, AMC
Produced by Studio Lambert
Two agencies compete for the same account, with a week to come up with the idea and pitch it to the client.
What you’ll learn: What agency life looks like when an idea has to survive other people. You see teams changing direction, staying late, second-guessing themselves and then walking into a room where a few people can kill the whole thing. It is reality television, so the drama comes with that caveat, but the basic pressures of pitching are very recognisable.
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) — Documentary
Director: Banksy
What begins as a documentary about street art turns into the strange story of Thierry Guetta, an obsessive filmmaker who reinvents himself as the artist Mr Brainwash and quickly becomes a commercial success.
What you’ll learn: How attention, self-promotion, and manufactured hype can shape the perceived value of creative work. The film plays with the line between authenticity and branding, asking whether people are responding to the art itself or the story built around it.
The Century of the Self (2002) — Documentary Series, BBC
Director: Adam Curtis
A four-part series about how the ideas of Sigmund Freud were used by public relations, advertising, and politics to influence public behaviour.
What you’ll learn: How advertising moved from selling products based on practical needs to connecting them with identity, emotion, and unconscious desire. It provides useful context for understanding many of the persuasive strategies still used by brands today.
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Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? (2022) — Documentary Series, Netflix
Director: Andrew Renzi
In the 1990s, Pepsi ran a campaign allowing customers to exchange points for branded merchandise. When an advert appeared to offer a fighter jet for seven million points, one student decided to take the promise literally—and brought Pepsi to court.
What you’ll learn: How a playful advertising idea can become a legal and reputational problem when its message is not carefully considered. The series explores campaign strategy, brand rivalry, promotional culture, and the distance between what a brand intends to say and what an audience actually hears.
Fashion
McQueen (2018) — Documentary
Directors: Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui
Through archival footage and interviews, the film follows Alexander McQueen’s journey from a working-class London upbringing to building some of fashion’s most theatrical and emotionally charged collections.
What you’ll learn: How personal history, technical skill, storytelling, and provocation can form a recognisable creative language. It also examines the pressure that comes when a designer’s identity becomes inseparable from the work.
Fresh Dressed (2015) — Documentary
Director: Sacha Jenkins
A history of hip-hop fashion, tracing its journey from customised streetwear and neighbourhood style to runway collections and global luxury brands.
What you’ll learn: How fashion grows from community, music, identity, and self-invention, not only from established design houses. It also explores how subcultural style is discovered, commercialised, and absorbed by the mainstream.
Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989) — Documentary
Director: Wim Wenders
Filmmaker Wim Wenders follows Yohji Yamamoto between Tokyo and Paris, observing how he thinks about clothes, identity, cities, images, and the human body.
What you’ll learn: How fashion can become a way of thinking about time, place, and identity. Rather than explaining a collection step by step, the film captures the atmosphere, references, and personal philosophy surrounding Yamamoto’s work.
Unzipped (1995) — Documentary
Director: Douglas Keeve
The film follows Isaac Mizrahi as he develops his 1994 autumn collection, moving from scattered references and anxious fittings to a runway show featuring Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, and Cindy Crawford.
What you’ll learn: How inspiration moves from pop culture, film, colour, and instinct into a coherent collection. It captures the messy, funny, highly social reality of making fashion before the finished work becomes polished campaign imagery.
Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018) — Documentary
Director: Lorna Tucker
The film follows Vivienne Westwood from her role in shaping British punk through to building an internationally recognised fashion house, while continuing her work as an environmental and political activist.
What you’ll learn: How rebellion can develop into a lasting visual language—and what happens when an anti-establishment identity becomes an established global brand. It explores the tension between creativity, commerce, activism, and protecting a designer’s original point of view.
Art
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010) — Documentary
Director: Tamra Davis
Built around rare footage and an interview filmed by Tamra Davis in 1986, the documentary traces Basquiat’s journey through New York’s downtown art scene and his rapid rise to international recognition.
What you’ll learn: How an artist develops a visual language from personal history, cultural references, politics, music, and the world around them. It also explores how attention, identity, and the art market can shape—and consume—a young artist’s career.
The Price of Everything (2018) — Documentary
Director: Nathaniel Kahn
Artists, collectors, auction houses, dealers, and critics discuss how contemporary art is created, valued, bought, and sold.
What you’ll learn: How artistic and financial value become intertwined. The film reveals how reputation, scarcity, storytelling, institutions, and market demand influence which artists receive attention and what their work is considered worth.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) — Documentary
Director: Alison Klayman
The film follows Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei as he moves between art, architecture, political resistance, and online communication while facing increasing pressure from the Chinese government.
What you’ll learn: How creative work can function as documentation, protest, and public communication. It shows how an artist can use objects, spaces, images, and digital platforms to challenge authority and make complex political issues visible.
Waste Land (2010) — Documentary
Director: Lucy Walker
Artist Vik Muniz works with waste pickers at Jardim Gramacho, one of the world’s largest landfill sites near Rio de Janeiro, to create large-scale portraits using materials collected from the site.
What you’ll learn: How the meaning of an artwork can come from its materials, location, and collaborative process. The film also raises questions about authorship, representation, and what happens when art enters—and potentially changes—the lives of the people involved.
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) — Documentary
Director: Matthew Akers
Marina Abramović prepares for a major retrospective at MoMA, including a performance in which she sits silently across from individual visitors throughout the exhibition.
What you’ll learn: How preparation, repetition, physical endurance, and audience participation can become the material of an artwork. It also explores how an artist creates emotional meaning without relying on a conventional object.
Written by Debora Deva
Debbie is a writer, art director, and multidisciplinary creative at TOML Collective. With a background in advertising, she brings fresh perspectives to the journal — aiming to educate, question, and spark new ideas.
Get in touch with debora@tomlcollective.com