Shooting during 2020

Looking back at the challenges of the pandemic

It's been just over 4 years since our Production Manager Fi dropped the crew a brief email confirming what we'd all all been anticipating: that all shoots for the week ahead, and for the foreseeable future, had been cancelled.

Similar had been happening across industries worldwide, and the misery of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns for many is well documented. For media freelancers, the immediate worry was the lack of financial support; and, once the sector started to re-open, the challenges of how to make productions which rely upon human contact.

On Great British Gardens, we were in the very sticky position of being halfway through a year-long documentary following the seasons in some of the country's most prestigious gardens. With "Spring" about to burst into bloom we had kit packed and standing in the hallway when the message came. A frantic but isolated month followed where the production came up with all sorts of methods for keeping the story going. We were fortunate to be one of the first productions to be back up and running, due to the factual nature of the programme and its relative low risk as an almost exclusively outdoor affair- but with some major caveats.

The biggest would be the absence of our star, Carol Klein, whose effervescent presenting and vast horticultural knowledge were the lynchpin of the show. It was decided that shooting one season with her voiceover as guidance would be the next best thing. Similarly, filming with many of our main contributors was deemed too risky, although if you know gardeners, you'll know they'd rather chew off their own arms than leave their precious plants to their own devices for a whole season, which led to some rather comic filming with a long lens from a safe distance as they attended their gardens, like flighty safari animals in wellies.

The crew was depleted by more than half, with only me and researcher Oli Taylor allowed on location. A steeper learning curve you could not image for him, as his duties suddenly included 2nd Camera, Boom Op and everything in between. The rest of the excellent crew were very much missed but Oli did an amazing job of stepping up to the challenge, and also kept me sane on the shoots, in between eating our takeaways alone in various Travelodge bedrooms across the country. We shot our contribs going about their duties, and through it all, the gardens kept on growing, oblivious to the effect of the pandemic on their human keepers...and I felt so lucky to be able to appreciate them.

Any production will remember the changes that followed: teaching interviewees to fix their own mics, undertaking intense interviews while half-hidden behind a mask, the stress of Covid Co-ordination when faced with every-changing rules and the sense of responsibility that came with it.

It was only after the fact that some of the effects became apparent. For me, the shock of social awkwardness in large crews, something which had never before been a problem. And the ongoing issues in the industry as a whole, with the scarcity of work around. But 4 years on, I am proud of myself and my colleagues for our resilience and ingenuity under the duress of those times. And I've never been so aware of the necessity of nature for human beings to thrive.