Perspectives on shooting, editing, and managing documentaries in the pandemic
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courtesy of Eastern African Journalism Review Issue N.1: September 2020The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented disruption of the film industry, upending norms built over more than a century of gradual technological and social evolution. Though nearly every production in progress came to a halt in March 2020, many did not stay halted for long. Filmmakers and their crews adapted, figuring out how to use remote collaboration tools when they could and sussing out appropriate social distancing guidelines on set.
Documentaries were no exception. I reached out to several filmmakers to share their experiences with pandemic production to learn more about how they made it work. Given the rapid pace of world events that needed capturing in 2020 and 2021, it was all the more important that nonfiction crews be able to safely capture shifting events.
This was particularly important for director So Yun Um, who was in the middle of shooting her feature Liquor Store Dreams (2022) when quarantine hit. Since the film deals in part with contemporary race relations in Los Angeles — particularly between the Black and Korean communities — she couldn’t ignore the nationwide protests occurring during the summer of 2020. “Luckily, our production team was already small from the beginning,” she explains, meaning it didn’t take long for them to continue the work after the shutdown. “If there was a need to film, I would go out myself and get what we needed. Or if we needed our entire crew, I had to just plan for everyone to get tested, wear masks, and be open to filming in enclosed spaces.”
Penny Lane has finished one film, Listening to Kenny G (2021), and started another, Confessions of a Good Samaritan, since the start of the pandemic. What struck her most about production during this time are the stops and starts caused by changing circumstances, whether positive (the availability of vaccines) or negative (new-variant infection waves).
“It’s all such a blur– in retrospect, it’s hard to quantify,” she says. “Things were interrupted, often more than once … we’d start to set something up, but conditions would worsen and we’d once again cancel. For Confessions in particular, because it’s such a personal film and a lot of it is archival, I ended up spending a lot more time editing and writing on my own than I’d imagined. And that film also became more archivally oriented than I’d planned.”
As a producer, Bennett Elliot had many irons in the fire in March 2020, ranging from the final shoot on Robert Greene’s Procession (2021) to Abel Ferrara’s Sportin’ Life (2020), which had only just begun filming. She explains that Sportin’ Life similarly had to take on a more archival focus, making for one of “the biggest creative pivots over the course of the pandemic. Originally, we were planning to make a film that took place across several movie sets in Europe and the US. COVID made that impossible. Our director had to scrap the original concept and pivot to a format that included both self-shot footage and archival news material.”
The disparate budgets, crew sizes, and production resources meant each filmmaker had to incorporate safety protocols in different ways as they went along, based on how their crews were formulated. Um’s crew was small enough that they could observe normal CDC guidelines for everyday social interaction most of the time when doing shoots. Lane looked to other filmmakers for advice, but since Listening to Kenny G was for HBO, “they had set standards we had to follow, taking much of the guesswork out of it.”
Elliot faced a much more difficult challenge. “Creating safety plans amidst shifting variants, on productions of all sizes, is a new set of mental gymnastics that producers have never had to face,” she says. “The safety of the crew and cast is always a responsibility that falls to us, but creating guidelines specifically to keep COVID off our set is absolutely crazy-making. I am extremely fortunate to have a close-knit network of producer friends, and all of our experiences of dealing with COVID take up pages in our group chat.”
For an untitled boxing film she’s been working on, “The delays were countless … we were often filming with hundreds of extras every day. We needed to set testing standards that kept folks isolated while waiting for their results. There were a couple of times when we had extras who tested positive, and we were able to send them home without endangering anyone, which felt like a small success.”
Each interviewee rattled off a familiar list of apps and tools that have aided them in socially distanced filmmaking. Nearly all were oriented around messaging and calls: Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, FaceTime, etc. Lane also noted that they shifted to using a cloud-based Avid system for editing. She also laid out the basic setup of conducting interviews remotely: “We used a video monitor to sit in for me to limit the number of people in the room. I was interviewing from one room over (or from across the country), over a live feed. This was no big deal, just more expensive and with more tech setup.” Attica (2021) co-director Traci Curry described a similar process in a separate interview, stressing the extra care taken to make any seams invisible.
How well producers have adjusted is controversial. For her part, Um says, “I’m so used to the remote life now … In many ways I preferred it, because driving in LA takes so much time, so meeting via Zoom was very convenient. My editor and I would sometimes just sit on Google Meet all day and talk while editing. The only hard part was not being able to review the footage in real time, but we made it work.” In contrast, Elliot says, “I’ve really missed the community of being in a production office, where you can gather your team and manage fires in real time. I appreciate the convenience that Zoom allows, but some things can be handled more efficiently face-to-face.”
Elliot was also able to elucidate some of the tangible artistic impact that social distancing has on a production. “With social distancing protocols, there’s a noticeable difference in the relationships you’re able to create and maintain. For me, one of the best practices when making a documentary is spending a lot of time with your subject(s) without a camera. It takes time to build a bond with them. In COVID, we’re so limited with time and resources that there’s a pressure to always be rolling. You don’t know if you’ll get another opportunity to be in that space with that person, and you have to maximize the time you have.”
Because of this, Elliot says that she’s “looking forward to having the pandemic behind us!” Lane is likewise hoping for a time when there’s no longer any need for restrictions, saying there’s “nothing!” she’d like to keep from the remote production process, even if “it’s nice to be reminded that in some cases — simple interviews, for example — being there in person isn’t necessary (as the director).” Um says that she at least would like to continue with virtual meetings, and that she hopes people continue to wear masks on sets.
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