Gilles Deleuze and other post-modern thinkers have inspired influential aspects of education research theory and practice. Deleuze's experiential empiricism chimes with Dewey's. This broader experiential empiricist conceptual frame may suggest that observational filmmaking for education should work in an arts-based research and learning paradigm, which may be best located in the arts and humanities rather than the social sciences. But these categorisations do not help this cross-disciplinary practice. It is more useful to focus on the advantages to children, teachers and researchers. Observational filmmaking for education is explorative and generative. It allows detailed focus without losing a sense of the whole circumstances. Empathetic, aesthetic, material and affective routes to understanding others are foregrounded through catalysing participation, collaboration and the value of multiple perspectives.