Amber was founded in 1968 by film and photography students at London's Regent Street Polytechnic, and moved to Tyneside a year later with the aim of documenting life in North East England.

[3] Scholars David Crouch and Richard Grassick write, "Amber's work argues for a long-term commitment to communities, encouraging active participation in the production process by those being filmed.

[6] Amber benefitted from the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) Workshop Agreement of 1984 gave financial and structural stability to filmmakers operating outside of the mainstream.

[2] The collective paid themselves £5 a week, and set about to record working-class life which, founding member Murray Martin told The Guardian, had been banned from the works of earlier, celebrated documentarians such as John Grierson.

Productions included Mai, about an Irish-Indian anarchist; Last Shift, about a traditional brick-making factory on the brink of closure, and Quayside, a tour around the Newcastle dock area, which was also set for demolition.

[7] Channel 4 helped to finance and produce their first feature-length film, Seacoal, a semi-fictional narrative set among the coal-collectors on Lynemouth beach, close to the coal-mining towns of Ellington and Ashington.

The BFI's Martin Hunt comments that Seacoal "built upon earlier techniques and experiments to interweave a fictional narrative with documentary footage, and improvised and reconstructed dramatic scenes.

[11] Dream On from 1991 was a feature length film produced by the collective starring Anna-Marie Gascoigne and Amber Styles combining realism with fantasy elements to tell the stories of women living in the Meadow Well estate in North East England.