A digital scrapbook of life in Britain - Spring 2020.
Written by Catherine Willoughby
Performed by Syeshia Sweeney
Directed / Edited by Anthony Rubinstein
Check out this incredibly powerful and poetic look back at life in Britain in 2020. We recently caught up with director Anthony Rubinstein to get his perspective on making his film during lockdown.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR FILMMAKING BACKGROUND:
I’m a London based director / filmmaker who loves getting stuck into complex editing and graphical projects. I used to work at Red Bull Media House doing mainly extreme sports and events, but now I do a wide range of projects; across music videos, commercials and documentaries. I’m a big fan of integrating new technologies into my films - 360 cameras, FPV drones, new editing techniques... Check out more on my instagram @a.r.visual !
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE INSPIRATION BEHIND YOUR FILM:
This film was basically just our scrapbook of all the wild things we saw happening during spring 2020. The world was undergoing a paradigm shift and we wanted to document it somehow. We also saw a lot of homogenous content come out at the start of lockdown about how we were all going to get through this together. It all seemed quite superficial and hollow, none of it really resonated that much with us at the time. We felt that the Great British public really did have a unique way of dealing with this crisis - it was through incessant memes, forming orderly queues and building eccentric contraptions in our gardens, and that’s what we felt we needed to document.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BRING THIS FILM TO LIFE DURING LOCKDOWN AND WHAT OBSTACLES DID YOU OVERCOME ALONG THE WAY?:
The hardest thing was not being able to shoot anything beyond our family bubble…. We had next to no lighting, or anything other than my Black Magic Pocket 6k camera to make use of - but we flipped this into an opportunity to integrate found footage in a creative and interesting way.
DID YOU HAVE ANY CREATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR CREATING QUALITY CONTENT ON A MINIMAL BUDGET DURING LOCKDOWN:
The main challenge was find a way of knitting together all the archive and social media footage (which massively varied in quality) in a contemporary and engaging manner. I spent a lot of time in After Effects building, designing and refining the virtual social media timelines - and decorating all the footage with glowing borders and icons. I was really keen to make this a bit of a statement piece about what can be done with low quality smart phone footage, when you really can’t go out and film anything. Actually, since we published the film we’ve have a lot of bands and agencies get in touch about using this style for other projects.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE PART OF THE FILMMAKING PROCESS:
I’m getting really into my sound design at the moment - this film had about 25 layers of SFX in the end, which is way more than I would usually do. I just kept going deeper and deeper and thickening it up more and more. I think because the footage is not the best quality, so much of the atmosphere and emotion comes from the subtle sound effects and textures. I really love how the right sound can bring a story alive.
ANY FILM RECOMMENDATIONS THAT WE CAN WATCH TO KEEP US BUSY WHILE SOCIAL DISTANCING:
The Last Dance on Netflix is awesome! I never paid much attention to basketball before but this a real masterpiece of a sports doc.
Interested in getting your work selected as Short of the Week?