Documenting Lockdown - Personal Photographic & Film Project
As I write this, on 6th July 2020, the UK had recently surpassed 100 days of “Lockdown”. Hopefully, a once in a generation occurrence, and certainly something so unprecedented. Now, 4 months in, it seems we are adjusting to the new measures and elements of these are likely to form a large part of our lives for the foreseeable future.
As the new restrictions were introduced, I felt it important to document the changes in my home town and surroundings photographically as a reminder to these challenging circumstances.
The government permitted daily exercise allowed me to take responsible photo walks within my immediate local area, so, armed with my Fujifilm X-Pro 1 I done just that. No one wold be able to predict how long the restrictions would remain in place so it wasn’t in my immediate mindset to do much more than these photowalks in my community.
As things progressed however, and the scale of the global pandemic heightened along with increasing numbers of cases in the UK, I felt a few documentary style film ideas begin to develop.
The spark came after watching my personal filmmaking idol Philip Bloom shoot and upload a few sequences to his YouTube channel. They were a mixture of personal short films in a series as well as commissioned work by a news agency in his local town of Richmond upon Thames.
His third film in the series “Good Friday - 18th day of Lockdown” caught my attention the minute it was live on his YouTube channel. Having known Philip’s work for several years and his traditional use of orchestral soundtracks, this piece took an alternative direction by featuring only scratch audio and foley. By doing this it really encapsulated the change in surroundings and how I have felt that your sense of sound has been heightened somewhat during lockdown. The streets were definitely quieter with much less traffic and noise pollution in general was much lower. Yet nature still continued as normal and strangely, more and more people seemed to be out exercising.
I felt Dumfries town would lend itself well to a similar film project, despite the size and the population, there was a noticeable difference in how the lockdown restrictions had affected it. I also knew I didn’t want to have any soundtrack sitting as a bed under the footage captured, instead taking a similar approach to Philip by recording scratch audio and adding foley effects later. For my film however I thought I’d put a slight spin on the foley by using sound that would have been heard had there not been any lockdown restrictions. For instance, the sounds of children playing in the park and the sounds at the local cricket club.
I decided early on to film and present this film in 4K, I also had some appropriately fast memory cards for my Panasonic GH5 and GH5s camera to record in the 10-bit 4:2:2 options for ultimate quality and colour capture.
I set about writing down a shot list of areas I knew had seen significant changes during lockdown and initially I wanted this to be a fairly short finished product.
As time progressed however, I found myself going out for longer periods, filming some areas more than once just to see what changes I could document. Figures for the area, Scotland and the rest of the UK were also changing at a rapid pace so wondered how this would affect people’s willingness to venture out of their homes for their permitted exercise.
My own efforts to keep safe were made while filming, often walking or cycling into town instead of driving due to being largely non essential journeys (however the extra physical efforts weren’t exactly ideal when temperatures soared past 25 degrees on some days) ensuring I kept my distance from passers by and also making conscious efforts to film when certain landmarks were largely deserted - this was the important point I wanted to capture.
Followers of my social media will have seen some screen grabs from the completed film however as my filming progressed, this project became much larger than I initially anticipated. I have captured far more footage than I planned, meaning I had to be quite selective over which shots to include. The result is a film over 7 minutes in running time and I had spent 3 nights alone searching and adding the appropriate foley tracks.
I’m now pleased to release this completed film in its 4K glory along with this initial stills from the beginning of lockdown. I definitely think this has been an important project to work on as a timely reminder of a global event nobody could have predicted.
Dan