Filmmaking with Zoom
This post is from Lily Ford, a historian and producer at the Derek Jarman Lab. Find out more about her research at lilyfordresearch.com.
Filmmaking became a particularly solitary experience during lockdown. I had the task of making a documentary about a woman who had spent most of her life on another continent, engaged in a profession that I knew little about. Before, I would have gone to the library to read her books, but libraries were closed. Latterly, I would have applied for funds to go and film people speaking about her in her home country, but borders were closed. Normally, I would have sought to interview scholars in this country, but we weren’t allowed to be in a room together. So everything had to come via my screen. Desktop documentary. Kitchen table documentary, when the kids were off school. Editing to the tunes of children’s television and breaking off colour correcting to find the requisite piece of Lego.
By asking for contacts and cold calling people, and through the generosity of some enthusiastic new acquaintances, I gathered a good selection of people to interview. I decided to conduct the interviews via Zoom, and only use the footage if I really had to. Once I’d had the first conversation, I changed my mind. It felt a magical privilege to be learning about Argentinian history, and about my charismatic and complex subject Marie Langer, in a digital tête-a-tête with a historian thousands of miles away. It was difficult to get up and do the school pick-up afterwards—I missed the decompression time, and the processing of experiences built into conventional modes of filming on location. (I missed it even more when schools closed again, meaning that interviews had to be conducted in the 75 minutes it took for a movie to absorb my sons’ attention.) But I wanted to share this sense of being addressed directly with the viewer, so I latticed together the webcam footage to form the backbone of the film.
The experience of having these remote conversations, and of figuring out how best to capture and use them in the film, was very new for me. We were all working out how to live parts of our lives through screens in 2020. I was lucky to have a feedback loop in the form of Birkbeck’s Hidden Persuaders group, who had commissioned the film and gave me valuable responses to drafts via online meetings and email. But by staying at home I was also missing the casual encounters that can help to cast new light on challenges. After an online meeting of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI), I got talking to an artist and practice-led researcher at Birkbeck, Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, about the new horizon of the Zoom encounter, and how to negotiate and work with it. We decided to put on a series of events with BIMI focusing on using Zoom in research filmmaking.
The first session, on 30th April, is designed as a space to explore and share the practical and phenomenological experiences we’ve had in the last year with others who are engaged or thinking of engaging in using Zoom in their work. Sasha, practice-based researcher Henry Mulhall, and I will lead with some of our own reflections and invite discussion from participants. In the second, on 7th May, my brilliant colleague Walter Stabb will offer some guidance on the technical aspects of video and audio recording with Zoom. In the third, on 14th May, documentary maker Megumi Inman will talk through interviewing techniques. All are welcome. I’m looking forward to comparing notes and finding a way to make these remote encounters as productive as possible.
Lily Ford’s film, Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society, was made as part of Birkbeck’s Hidden Persuaders project, and is available to watch online here.
‘Can you hear me?’ Online interviewing for moving-image based research
Session 1: Adventures in Zoom, 30th April 2021, 1–2pm, book here.
Session 2: Practical tips on using Zoom interviews, 7th May 2021, 10–11am, book here.
Session 3: Interview skills, 14th May 2021, 1–2pm, book here.
