Life In Lockdown - A Journey: Behind The Scenes

Ah, who doesn’t love a director's commentary? Lifting the lid on the magic of film and revealing all the dirty little secrets beneath. What do you mean, “struggling for content to fill a daily blog now that I haven’t left the house for coming up on nine weeks?” How absolutely dare you. Anyway. Here’s a small behind the scenes glimpse into how I made yesterday’s brief filmy diversion.

Beginnings
I’ve been posting silly pictures (mostly for my own amusement more than anything else) charting the ongoing progress of life under lockdown over on Facebook basically since this whole thing began. It was on my run around the garden last Friday that I suddenly felt that I should convert them into a single live action piece. As often happens with short film ideas, they’re prompted while listening to music and are pretty much fully formed in a short space of time. (I mean, I helped that I already had a load of posts to basically steal; if you can, always recycle something that you know works…).

Preparation & Shooting
It might only be short and pretty throwaway but you still need to plan these things out. So I sat and wrote a list of the individual scenes which I then broke down into specific shots I needed. Despite the differing hairs lengths, almost the whole thing was shot in one morning (and over about a half hour period). Any scenes with me looking scruffy and unshaven were shot first; I then had a shave to shoot the beginning and end scenes with the last scene of that batch of filming being me going for a run as I shot those at the start of my actual run. The only scenes not shot in this block were me eating and drinking which was shot the night before, after the family Zoom quiz (as I had food and drink to hand), and the Tiger King shot which was filmed on the Sat night prior to a Tiger King themed Zoom quiz with friends (I have been doing a lot of Zoom quiz mastering over the last few weeks; it’s everyone’s new lockdown hobby). Combined with some of the existing photos I’d posted, that was filming done.

There were a couple of bits that I considered but didn't add in the end - a montage of everyday items now unused, unearthed as part of an archeological exploration; dressing up smart for Formal Friday. I wanted it to be pretty snappy - as close to two minutes as possible. Get in, be silly, get out quick.

Editing
Back in the dim and distant past when I last properly used editing programmes, you had to get your tape and transfer the footage onto the computer first (yeah, I know, steady on, Grandad). Nowadays, if I didn't like a voice over (the word “morning” was recorded separately, obviously), I’d record it again on the phone and, by the time the Photos app had synced, I could drag and drop it straight into iMovie. No wonder everyone makes so many videos now, it’s bloody easy. 

There are also plenty of sources for copyright free music. I used Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/) who has rather splendidly created around 2,000 or so pieces of copyright free for people to use. The only stipulation here under the Creative Commons Licence is that you make sure you credit him. Seems more than bloody fair to me.

Et Voila
And that was it really. Shot in about thirty minutes, edited in around an hour (including sourcing music) and exported and uploaded to YouTube. Does this mean I’ll be making something else? Give it another 13 years and inspiration might strike again...

The Formal Friday image which never made it to the filmed version