“Lockdown” – An Observational Film

I felt my home town of Dumfries would lend itself well to a film project similar to the short series of films recently produced by Philip Bloom. Despite the size and the population, there was a noticeable difference in how the lockdown restrictions had affected it. I also knew I didn’t want to have any soundtrack sitting as a bed under the footage captured, instead taking a similar approach to Philip by recording scratch audio and adding foley effects later. For my film however I thought I’d put a slight spin on the foley by using sound that would have been heard had there not been any lockdown restrictions.

My own efforts to keep safe were made while filming, often walking or cycling into town instead of driving due to being largely non essential journeys, ensuring I kept my distance from passers by and also making conscious efforts to film when certain landmarks were largely deserted – this was the important point I wanted to capture.

Followers of my social media will have seen some screen grabs from the completed film however as my filming progressed, this project became much larger than I initially anticipated. I have captured far more footage than I anticipated, meaning I had to be quite selective over which shots to include. The result is a film over 7 mins in running time and I had spent 3 nights alone of searching and adding appropriate foley tracks.

I’m now pleased to release this completed film in its 4K glory along with this initial stills from the beginning of lockdown. I definitely think this has been an important project to work on as a timely reminder of a global event nobody could have predicted.

Filmed with the Panasonic GH5 and GH5S in 4K 25p and 50p – at 10-bit 4:2:2 colour. Graded with FilmConvert.

Full blog post over on my website
dvd.lol www.stagetwoimaging.co.uk/blog//documenting-lockdown-personal-photographic-amp-film-project

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