Arrow Media’s Nick Metcalfe, executive producer of American Monster, and Lucie Ridout, who exec produces Investigation Discovery’s See No Evil, talk through the challenges and solutions when producing under Covid-19 restrictions.

Nick Metcalfe

Nick Metcalfe, American Monster
What’s the news you don’t want to hear, on a weekend, when you have British crews filming in the US? The country will be locking down and international travel will be restricted, meaning they have to leave within 48 hours or they may be trapped, possibly for weeks.

Taking care of the team at such a challenging moment was Arrow’s number one priority. So, after working hard to get everybody home, we needed to assess how to keep the production on track.

The crews were due to shoot interviews for American Monster, travelling widely across the country for up to a month. Substituting US directors of photography and producers for British crews could have been a solution, except that travel between, and even within, states was also widely restricted. And many interviewees didn’t want anybody coming into their homes, whatever the colour of their passports.

The solution, which would have been inconceivable perhaps even a year ago, was to remove the human element from the shoots, as far as possible, and harness the power of the internet.

American Monster turned to self-shot interviews

We found a camera which could be controlled remotely via the web. It sounded promising, offering high-quality capture (4K), two-way visual connection and including lights that just needed to be plugged in by the interviewee… Ah! Hold up! Would interviewees be willing to set the thing up – plugging in the lights, hooking up to the internet, and just how user-friendly was it? And what about poor internet connections?

Cue a hastily arranged IKEA-type assembly test, involving a techno-phobic guinea pig (actually an otherwise highly competent Arrow Media human colleague) and a flat-pack from hell. Unpack, assemble, and let the internet do the rest? It says here that the remote controls allow the operator to set the frame, adjust the lights (daylight? Tungsten?) and exposure. Blimey! It works.

But what about nervous interviewees thousands of miles away? When they talked to a box, would we get the animation and energy we wanted? And if the internet was poor, would we get anything at all? And we still had to get the camera to the location…

Fortunately, delivery companies were on the list of essential workers. So, we shipped it to a local runner who sanitised it before delivery to the interviewee (and then again after). Then, over to the interviewee. And by good luck (or, as I prefer to think, in testimony to the researchers who found strong animated contributors, and the directors who talked them through the interviews and the willingness of interviewees who gamely gave it a go) the results worked, really well – meaning you can’t tell pre-Covid from Covid interviews. And with a dongle plugged into the back of the camera, we bypassed the poor internet.

Lucie Ridout

Lucie Ridout, See No Evil
We were 14 episodes through a 20-hour season of See No Evil for Investigation Discovery. With all interviews in the can, all we had left to do was the drama recreation for the last six episodes. Then Covid struck.

See No Evil recreations are all shot in Canada, with our production partner, Saloon Media, and we still had two directors on location. As Canada shut down, we accepted this was not going to be over quickly, brought them home and concocted a new plan. We had shot plenty of scenes over the previous five seasons, totalling 62 hours of See No Evil. A massive effort from the team went into finding, logging and uploading every frame of previously unused drama from those episodes and feeding it into the remote edits (aka people’s kitchens). Along with the B roll from the interview shoots, we made it to 19 episodes, with no noticeable difference… but there was still one problem episode (there always is).

See No Evil

In this particular story, our victim was an elderly lady without any family who was discovered horrifically murdered, headfirst down a well. Little family archive and a very niche crime scene. We had to film in Canada, but we needed the government regulations to change to make it possible. Our strategy was to minimise drama recreation and get creative. Luckily, our victim always wore a wig, which took a hair and make-up crisis out of the equation.

The rest of the cast were a different matter, so there are no close-ups that capture a detective’s hairlines. A skeleton crew moved into operation, observing strict Covid safety procedures and working in rounds to ensure limited numbers on set at any one time. The director also hatched a smart plan to shoot multiple angles with different cast members in at different times, so the scenes look well-populated even though the cast was never all on set at the same time.

With long lenses, dirty frames and a purpose-built well we managed it, all directed remotely from London. The final film made post and was delivered just in time for the air date.