Filmmaking in Lockdown. Part 1.

March 2020. The month when many countries all around the world implemented their first COVID lockdowns. By April 2020, about half of the world's population was under lockdown. Filmmakers and advertisers had to find new ways to create audiovisual content. For the first of this two-part newsletter, let’s have a look at how creators approached their art in such unsettling times. 

The initial reaction of many brands was to quickly show their compassion. Since their creative teams couldn’t film a new ad, they dug into stock-footage libraries to compile an empathic commercial accompanied with the most inoffensive music track they could find. YouTube creator Microsoft Sam gathered all these first COVID commercials in one unique video, to reveal that every brand had the exact same - and cliché - response.

Stock footage became so popular that it even resulted in two brands, Guarantee Rateand Indeed, using the same short piece of stock footage in their 2021 Super Bowl commercials.

Alternatives to stock footage had to be found to stay original. I discovered Instagram to be a good new source and assembled images taken by hundreds of Instagrammers in this experimental piece “Memories Connect”.

Also, advertisers started to become more creative within the new constraints. The creative team for Honda wrote, directed, and edited the successful commercial #stayhome not leaving their living room for one single moment. 

While unable to travel, many filmmakers started to scour their own neighborhoods to document the surrealistic empty streets the lockdown created. Dutch-Canadian filmmaker Ryan Koopmans took another approach and went underground. He took advantage of the unsettling quiet in Stockholm and created a portrait of the capital’s decorative metro system, also called “The longest art gallery in the world.”

Other filmmakers kept their camera equipment for good use at home and filmed the impact the lockdown had on families. In this adorable mini-documentary “157 - A Collection Of Moments”, filmmaker Gnarly Bay shows intimate and unpolished moments of him and his family. 

And then slowly, lockdown restrictions were lifted and streets started to fill up again. Filmmaker Apo Genc, symbolizes this transition period with his experimental piece “After the silence”.

Next month, I will continue with how the pandemic had a long-lasting effect on audiovisual content creation. Stay tuned for Filmmaking After (the first) Lockdown, Part 2. 

See you next month!