In the spring and summer of 2020, work dried up pretty comprehensively. Nothing like a lockdown to lock out the freelancers.

Friend and frequent collaborator Andy Potter is a freelance DoP, and about the closest I get to a colleague as a freelancer. If we’re ever going to make that short, he said, now’s probably a good time.

Making a short film on no budget turned out to employ all the principles and craft of work, and a few more besides. (I have never made recently torn flesh from raspberry jelly, cranberry jam, fake blood and white bread for work.) It served very well to keep the rust off the creative cogs, and throwing our energies into a passion project turned out to be a definite highlight in an otherwise barren wasteland of a year.

I had this script that Andy had liked when we were working together before. I dusted it off and adapted it a bit for lockdown, and we began casting around for drama students. It was rewritten, cast, and prepped in two months, and shot over two days on zero budget between lockdowns in July 2020, and edited throughout the lockdown winter. All the cast and crew gave up their time, and we all loved doing it. Watch it on a telly or a good system with decent sound if you can.