Now that my lockdown film Inside Time is out in the world, I thought I’d write a short post to tell a little of the story behind the film and how it all came to be. 

I guess it all properly began on the 23rd March 2020. It was on this date that I contacted what would be my partner and editor for the project, Tommaso Di Paola, and told him about my idea for the short film. Coincidentally, it was also on this date that the UK went into official lockdown. 

By this point, Coronavirus was already taking hold in the UK, with the majority of people voluntarily staying home, and I knew that all the projects I was currently working on were going to be cancelled or postponed. Which left me in the position of having nothing to work on for at least a few months, something I knew was going to be tough mentally. As a filmmaker, I find having no active projects or creative work to do quite challenging, and it often sends me into a mild form of depression, so I knew I had to find something creative to fill my time for the coming months.

Initially, it actually all started as a photography project. I’ve always been a fan of photographer Alain Laboile, whose beautiful photos purely focus on his life at home with his family, and so I thought I could do something similar in my home during lockdown - try to look at my environment objectively and capture moments of beauty as they appeared. But I soon realised that not only was I missing an opportunity to film some of these moments, but that there must also be thousands of filmmakers in a similar position - stuck at home with no work, lots of time, and camera equipment just sitting around gathering dust. And so I came up with the idea for a project which would harness the creative talent of filmmakers in lockdown and, hopefully, create something beautiful out of it. I called it The Shooting From Home Project.

I pitched the idea to Tommaso, who I’d worked with on a number of projects in the past (see Extra Life and The Last Cooperative), and we agreed to use this project to try and make a short, poetic documentary film that looked at this new way of life we were all experiencing and how there might be some positive things to take away from it. We felt the key to the project was to get as many different perspectives as possible, so we began the task of recruiting filmmakers, sending out a brief to people we knew and asking them to pass it around and, of course, posting it on social media. Quite quickly, however, we saw that the project was becoming very UK-centric, and we really wanted this to be a global piece. Enter The Smalls.

The Smalls is a global video commissioning platform, with a network of over 18,000 filmmakers worldwide, and we thought they would be ideally placed to help take the project global. We’d worked with The Smalls on a previous project, Extra Life, and so we pitched the idea to one of their producers and, fortunately for us, they loved the idea and said they were interested in collaborating.

And that’s where the project got really exciting. The Smalls posted the brief on their global platform and from that point on we started getting footage from filmmakers all around the world, giving us the opportunity to see how they were living in lockdown and allowing us to give the project a much more global perspective. It became fascinating to see not only the different ways people were coping with lockdown but also the many similarities. At the same time as all this footage was arriving, we started working with Jane Brittan, a talented author and creative writing lecturer, who agreed to write a poem that would tie all of the footage together and, through a connection with our producer Daisy Rylance, we were very fortunate to get BAFTA-winner Mackenzie Crook on board to voice this poem for us.

And so slowly but surely, throughout the long weeks of lockdown, our poetic short documentary, Inside Time, eventually came together. We finished it off with a beautiful score by composer Louis Souyave and sound design by Tom Parker (working with music supervision agency OPM), and a fantastic grade by colourist Finlay Reid of Goldcrest Films. Finally, on the 30th June 2020, after just over three months since it began, we released the final product of The Shooting From Home Project, our short film Inside Time. 

And the film ended up exceeding all of our expectations. Not only did it, hopefully, give the 26 international filmmakers who sent us footage a creative outlet during a difficult time, it gave me an opportunity to work on a film remotely, in a much more “hands-off” way than I ever have done before. And from a technical perspective, I found it really interesting to bring together footage from a wide variety of camera systems; from high-end cinema cameras like the RED Gemini, Sony F55 and Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro, to old DSLRs such as the Canon 7D, to mirrorless full-frame cameras like the Sony A7S III, and APS-C cameras like my trusty Fujifilm X-T2, right down to the not-so-lowly iPhone, and even an old MiniDV camera. And I think this reinforced the idea that it really doesn’t matter what camera you use, but how you use it. Sure, the expensive cinema cameras performed better in the grade, but I don’t think they produced the most beautiful footage in the film. 

Overall, I really hope the film succeeds in commenting on how many of us changed during lockdown. How, even if only for a few months, we were forced to slow down and really focus on ourselves, on the simpler things in life. And, I hope, some of these beneficial lockdown habits, behaviours, and mindsets stay with us as we emerge from this time inside, and slowly return to a version of life that we, many months ago, liked to think of as normal.

Watch Inside Time here.