Behind the Scenes: The Story of Our C4 Video
Musician Bernard Flythe plays the tuba in downtown Atlanta. A still from our video.
When I think about life before and after the pandemic, I imagine an offshoot breaking away from its leafy stem, a timeline splitting into two. I think about one of our last indoor shoots, a day just like any other before the lockdown.
It was a Sunday afternoon. We had just arrived in East Atlanta with our fancy new cinema camera to interview C4 Atlanta’s co-founders for the organization’s 10-year anniversary video. In our hands was the treatment we’d spent most of early March working on with Executive Director Jessyca Holland and her staff. It told the story of C4’s origins as an organization serving the area’s artists and its impact in the decade since. It would be shown during C4’s annual awards luncheon.
Talk turned to current events. “Have you heard about the rising number of cases?” “How long do you think it will last?” Like many others I was nervous but cautiously optimistic. I walked out of our shoot that day, rubbing my hands with sanitizer in an act that would soon become ritual, and thought: “This won’t last more than two weeks.”
Three days later, we moved all of our equipment out of our office.
Three and a half months later, we have yet to go back.
I don’t think anyone could have predicted the severity of COVID-19 or its impact on people’s livelihoods. Two-thirds of the nation’s artists have been left unemployed, and the creative community has been mourning the loss. Most of our projects, too, were cancelled or put on hold, stalled in pre-production.
Around mid-April we got a message from Jessyca. Even though they had canceled the awards luncheon, she still wanted to move forward with the video. Most of it had yet to be shot, which meant we would need to produce it in a way that ensured everyone’s safety. We also knew our original treatment no longer worked. The world had changed, as had C4’s work and the lives of the artists it supports. Our video would need to change, too.
We came up with the idea of a letter from Jessyca to her newborn granddaughter, Alice. During a time when the present seemed bleak, we reflected on the importance of stewardship and our responsibility to future generations. We also reflected on the need for artists during a time of rapid social change and found inspiration in the words of filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
We called our new story “Dear Alice.”
iMac gets a mask, too. Photo: Arvin Temkar
In order for Jesscya to safely record her new narration, we wiped down our audio equipment and dropped it off at her house. We set up socially distant shoots with local artists like musician Bernard Flythe, dancer Tyla Howell of Dance Canvas and muralist Angela Bartone. And when it came time for post-production, we shuttled our iMac back and forth between our apartments.
When we started this project, I thought I knew what the story would be. But timeline-altering events like the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement forced us to shift gears and come up with something else entirely, something that acknowledged this historic moment.
Of course it helps to have a client that’s flexible. And with C4, we couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator.
We really like how the final video turned out. We hope you do, too.
— Steph