Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

During the period of lockdown in Lahore a short documentary film; Life in Quarantine, is made by crowd-sourcing, as an experiment. This lockdown, from March 2020 to March 2021, is linked to the increasing cases of COVID-19 in cities and has an impact on the lives of the people who were restricted to their houses and personal spaces only. It was once in a lifetime kind of state, and everyday activities were reduced to a minimum. Life in Quarantine was planned with art, design, and film students, who were only connected through social media platforms, to make an audio-visual document of that phase of life in Lahore. Initially, around seventy participants replied and agreed to submit their video clips. A brief was given to all the willing contributors, through WhatsApp and Facebook, for making a video clip showing a slice of their particular day during the lockdown, and they can use any available technology. Finally, fifty clips were submitted and these were compiled into a single collective documentary film of six-minute duration; Life in Quarantine. This practice-based research examines the opportunity of making films by crowdsourcing through social media platforms and observes the potential of occupying creative individuals in the medium of film. It discovers the role of participatory culture and the possible typology of video clips in postcolonial societies. The final film is also part of this research practice and reflects the correlation between the combined innovation and the individual creativity of the contributors.