Filming During a Pandemic

I proposed this project to my BSA Troop before the pandemic started. I had visions of shooting inside schools and conducting group interviews inside classrooms. Everything changed in March 2020. At first I figured that I would have more time to plan. I still needed to do a lot of research about vaping, create storyboards for the film and recruit classmates to help with production and to be interviewed. While all of these things took a lot more time than I anticipated, by the summer it was clear that the pandemic was not going away anytime soon.

I had planned to attend an academic summer program, which was cancelled, so I changed to a virtual program on documentary filmmaking. Meanwhile I had to change every location I had planned to shoot. Since our classes had moved to Zoom in the Spring, I experimented with how we might record group interviews using Zoom, instead of within classrooms. I reduced acted scenes to just the three kids huddled together by the stadium, as trying to shoot scenes inside school hallways and bathrooms was not going to be safe. I also increased the length of explainer videos to provide more educational information without acted scenes.

While filming during 2020-21 was uniquely challenging, I hope that the film is still compelled to watch. My primary goal was to create a film that speaks to teens with teen voices, and although the pandemic forced me to adapt, I feel that the film’s voice hits the mark.