Watch an eerie new short film made entirely in… | Little White Lies

Short Stuff

Watch an eerie new short film made entire­ly in lockdown

24 Jul 2020

Words by Hannah Strong

A person with long dark hair sitting at a desk, working on some papers or documents. The desk is cluttered with various items including a mug.
A person with long dark hair sitting at a desk, working on some papers or documents. The desk is cluttered with various items including a mug.
Film­mak­er Sam O’Mahony explains how he utilised the resources at hand to make I Don’t Find Any of This Very Peaceful.

It’s down over four months since lock­down offi­cial­ly began, although many of us have been stuck inside for longer, and even now with the gov­ern­ment cajol­ing us to Stay Alert > Con­trol the Virus > Save Lives” by nip­ping down to Pri­mark or con­sid­er return­ing to the work­place in order to boost the crip­pled econ­o­my, the real­i­ty is, a lot of peo­ple are still spend­ing the major­i­ty of their time at home.

Per­son­al­ly I’ve been using the time to catch up on all the pres­tige tele­vi­sion I’ve missed over the past two years and to clear out the attic, but film­mak­er Sam O’Mahony set him­self a more cre­ative chal­lenge: to cre­ate a short about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion that avoid­ed the tropes that have become so preva­lent recent­ly: to-cam­era mono­logues, zom­bie apoc­a­lypse plot lines, and (baf­fling­ly) extreme­ly lo-res webcams.

Those ini­tial few weeks of lock­down, I was about to go and do a music video and my part­ner Lisa was about to film this Net­flix show,” Sam explains, and there was this very reac­tive thing where a lot of actors were sud­den­ly doing their own bits in front of web­cams and mak­ing bits about zom­bie apoc­a­lypse. I didn’t want to get involved, I didn’t want to be part of this bad film­mak­ing move­ment. But after a few weeks, there was a desire to make some­thing that used cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage, that had moti­vat­ed char­ac­ters. We can still be ambi­tious, even with very lim­it­ed resources.”

Large wasp flying in a dim urban setting with silhouetted skyscrapers in the background and text reading "I don't find any of this very peaceful".

The result is I Don’t Find Any of This Very Peace­ful, a film con­ceived, script­ed, shot and edit­ed on loca­tion in Sam and Lisa’s flat, in just sev­en weeks. Inspired by the mas­ter of mod­ern real­ism Michael Haneke, Sam was inter­est­ed in grap­pling with the inte­ri­or­i­ty of the pan­dem­ic: how our anx­i­eties have man­i­fest­ed beyond the com­pul­sion to watch Con­ta­gion or 28 Days Lat­er again.

Katharine, an artist (played won­der­ful­ly by Lisa Dwyer Hogg) is iso­lat­ed in her flat, wor­ried about a miss­ing part­ner and field­ing phone calls from her moth­er who seems to have a very dif­fer­ent per­cep­tion of the pan­dem­ic. When a vis­i­tor comes call­ing, Katharine is forced to con­front her demons. It’s am ambi­tious, expert­ly-exe­cut­ed bit of film­mak­ing, all the more impres­sive giv­en the dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances of its ori­gin. But how does one go about mak­ing a short dur­ing a pan­dem­ic that doesn’t feel hin­dered by the environment?

It’s dif­fi­cult, because if you have oth­er voic­es phys­i­cal­ly in the room, you can recog­nise when you’ve shot enough,” Sam admits. I had to split my head up into depart­ments, so I was men­tal­ly hand­ing the script over from the writer to the design­er to the pro­duc­tion man­ag­er who was stick­ing Post-it notes all over the apart­ment. And liv­ing in the world that you’re edit­ing, you walk from the edit suite back onto the set essen­tial­ly – so there’s always a voice in the back of your head say­ing Well, I could go back and shoot more.”

But the end prod­uct speaks for itself. I Don’t Find Any of This Very Peace­ful is a great piece of film­mak­ing, pan­dem­ic or not, and if you’re con­sid­er­ing pick­ing up a cam­era your­self to doc­u­ment the strange new world, Sam has some advice: You have to be ambi­tious– there is no point in doing it oth­er­wise. But be strict with how you’re going to make it, plan it prop­er­ly. If you act like you’re mak­ing a film with a fifty per­son crew, and work towards that lev­el of logis­tics and every­thing else, then just strip it down, you can achieve so much.”

Check out the short film below, and let us (and Sam!) know what you think.

You might like