If you’re anything like me, you have an inexplicable need to tell stories. It’s what excites you, what’s always in the back of your mind while you’re seeming to be living your life when actually you’re assembling and reassembling story fragments due to a flood of inspiration that unexpectedly assaults your imagination.

Nobody dedicates their lives to becoming a filmmaker because it’s easy. It is a life that sounds torturous to an outsider -- and it is to an extent -- but it’s also wonderful and worth every painful moment. A well told story has the power to move, inspire, create and propel its audience forward in life and so, provides an unparalleled gratification and catharsis for the story tellers.

As our lives move forward, our storytelling projects move forward -- our stories often borrow from our lives and our lives borrow from our stories -- And so on, every day: writing and creating and filming and --

Boom - it’s March 2020 and life is suddenly on hold.

I, and every filmmaker, actor, content creator, etc., that I know was struck very hard by the unprecedented creative (and life) restrictions that the 2020 pandemic thrust upon us. Many got through it, many did not. I found my way by creating on a scale that I had never done before: I created, wrote, filmed and edited a nine episode web series called Lockdown Living with a five person writers room and a cast of over twenty actors, most of whom have still not met in person. We started in April 2020 and I posted the episodes to YouTube this fall.

How was I able to do this? The explanation starts with a different question: Why?

WHY?

When you are challenged creatively, find your WHY, both for you as a creative and for the project you’re about to undertake. When I woke up unemployed from producing branded content and having moved back to my mom’s house while this whole COVID-19 thing blew over (it’s only gonna be 3 months, right?),I had several whys to take on this project.

On the professional side: momentum.

I had a good thing going at work and three narrative short films I was set to direct in 2020 -- all of those were put on pause or cancelled. Then I got the call from my job. I budgeted two days off to be sad and then went to work.

On the personal side: sanity.

I’ve found the best cure for unyielding sadness to be progress. Progress in anything would probably do but for me, the best brand of progress is that which is related to the goals associated with my lifelong passion. Did I want to stay sane during the quarantine? Yes. Did I know how to do it? Of course. Tell a story.

Beyond myself: because humanity needs stories.

Most of my friends and family require more than four hands to count the books, shows and movies that were ingested during the quarantine. From Fleabag to Tiger King, story upon story was consumed by audiences with an insatiable appetite and need to escape, to be validated, to believe that life would go on.

YOUR story is just as capable in uplifting those around you and those you will never meet. If you have the capability to tell a story, it is your duty to share it. A global pandemic is just another obstacle you need to navigate. Your “Why” is the fuel to keep you going.

With my “Whys” sorted out, I brainstormed a project: I want to make a series. It’s going to be funny, because we need to laugh more than ever. It’s going to be about the pandemic because the more we can laugh at the sillier parts, the more we can bravely face the harder parts.

Still from "Lockdown Living"

BUILD YOUR TEAM

Do you work best as an army of one or do you prefer collective creativity?

Both work. Both are rewarding -- Do what excites you. Or go with what you haven’t done before. Going outside your creative comfort zone helps you grow and keeps you focused.

For myself, I had already written countless scripts solo -- it was time to try writing with a team. I contacted comedy writers Allison Hayhurst, Sarah Franco, Nick Smithson and Montgomery Mauro and they were all eager to jump on board.

I had never acted as a showrunner before, so I winged it and led with what I thought could work. We started with a simple prompt: list out every hilarious situation you could find yourself in while in quarantine. Then: list every type of person who would be fun to watch. When enough ideas presented themselves, we’d pair the most interesting characters to the best fitting situation. A writer would claim a storyline and get to work. I gave us all goals -- let’s all write three episodes each, minimum. We ended up with eighteen total.

CHECK OFF THAT CREATIVITY BUCKET LIST ITEM

If pushing the envelope is the best way to stay focused and grow, then why not try something you’ve always wanted to try but never had the chance?

I challenged the writers to join me in taking a big step back and looking through a macro lens at the series as a whole: are there characters who are similar? Do any of them have the same motivations? Fears? Curiosities or insecurities? Who can be combined?

Combining the similar characters created a sort of “cinematic universe” I have always loved and wanted to explore. It was a world that felt alive. It was a place we all enjoyed coming back to every week and when instincts told us to give up.

Still from "Lockdown Living"

PLAY THE GAME

I’m one of those people who read the rulebook. Every crisis that stands in the way of creativity is really just a new set of rules to follow. Define them. Learn from them. Break them.

In the pre-vaccine / pre-rapid test world, production of any kind felt impossible.

But it wasn’t!

Right before production shut down at my job, we were discussing how to film branded content remotely. A video team leader referenced Searching -- a movie that took place on a computer screen. I watched the film and everything clicked: my series will be a show that looks like a Zoom meeting or video call. That is a framing device that you don’t need a crew for. The actors can use their cellphones to film themselves and share the footage with me to edit after production. I wasn’t exactly sure how we’d do it but I was confident I could figure it out, assuming actors would be one board.

Turns out, casting was the easy part. Our actors were found through postings on social networks and auditions were conducted over Zoom, as were the first script readings that involved the whole cast for each episode. It didn’t take much to find actors: everyone we spoke to was eager to join the project, having the same mindset as myself and the other writers.

A virtual script reading felt no different than an in-person reading and you’d forget that we were all looking at each other through tiny boxes on a computer screen instead of sitting together in a Manhattan studio. We’d feel out the material, go through lines, bounce around ideas. Filmmaking is at its best when everyone comes ready to collaborate, and so we did it all from the comforts of our own home.

BE YOUR OWN DP (FROM AFAR)

For remote filmmaking, your cell phone is a miracle.

The first step to remote DPing is finding the frame your actor will be using while self-taping their footage. The frame itself was dependent on the script-level decisions. The Zoom style stories feel very limited in scope, testing those limits is where you can set your story apart. While scripting, I asked every writer to keep in mind not just: what is the story? But also, HOW is this story told? Does this story take place over a Zoom style conference with a stationary webcam? Is this a video call on a cell phone? Is a character doing a live stream? Is this a dating app service? If these questions weren’t directly answered in the script, I would work through it with the writer when we went into production to find the best way to get the most out of each story.

I used video calls for 1 on 1 sessions with each actor, allowing me to see exactly what their phone will capture on production days. I didn’t want any episodes to consist of just talking heads, so we’d discuss ways to make the frames more dynamic, the actors coming up with brilliant ways for them to move around and use their space. With every frame set and the blocking in place, we’d do a final dress rehearsal over Zoom with the entire cast.

Still from "Lockdown Living"

ROCK THE PRODUCTION

On average, episodes were filmed in about three hours IF nothing went wrong (ha!). While remote filmmaking came with an entire host of new problems, it’s really just par for the course. It often feels like half of a production day is problem solving.

To film my actors remotely AND give them the ability to play off each other, we used a combination of Zoom and cell phone cameras. Sometimes the internet didn’t work, sometimes a camera ran out of storage. Problems would arise and we’d solve them.

EDIT THE DAMN THING

If you can’t edit, find someone who can. If you can’t afford them, go back to option one: and teach yourself to do it. There is free editing software available and an unlimited supply of video tutorials. I have many years of editing plus VFX work under my belt and I spent my pandemic post production learning whole new ways to accomplish what I needed. No matter the issue, you can figure it out.

I’ve always thought of editing as a jigsaw puzzle with multiple ways to fit each piece together. The post production for Lockdown Living was no different than any other project and yet nothing I had ever taken on before.

The edit consisted of two visual parts: editing all the footage into a rough cut, which would be fine-tuned until locked, and then putting in the visual effects to make the sequence look real (ie: a gallery view Zoom conference versus a 1-on-1 video call) as well as any VFX the story called for.

Due to the nature of Zoom style films, there were some episodes that ended up being the hardest edits in my career. When you look at an episode like the Zoom Bomber episode, there’s a scene with eight characters all interacting, all with their own stories within their little zoom window at the same time. Getting those windows to sync up, while also using the best takes, was tremendously challenging even in the simplest of episodes.

RELEASE

Send it out into the world before your doubts come home to roost. I struggle with this part more often than not -- I work away, putting something together and right when I hit the finish line, I stall. The longer you wait, the harder it is to take action.

FINAL “STEP” - CREATE MORE

Do it all again.

Will you need to resort to remote filmmaking? Maybe, maybe not. The outlined steps above is a method I made up on the fly: I wasn’t 100% certain it would work until I was in the edit. If it didn’t work, I’d figure something out. That’s what we do as creators. Regardless of the size of the tree that falls in the road, we find a way around it because it is always possible to create and it will always be worth the trouble.