With the 2020 Yorkton Film Festival having a delayed wrap-up, one wonders about what the 2021 edition will look like. It’s an open question, because film itself is going to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as filming is halted and delayed for many projects, and others will have their release dates changed to reflect both the difficulty surrounding production and the world in which the final projects will be released.
This is something we have already witnessed. There have been a few television series that have been delayed, after all, as filming had to halt and production moved around. Film releases have been delayed and thrown across the calendar, with the majority of planned 2020 movies being pushed to different months or years, or just pushed directly to streaming platforms, depending on the target market and the expected returns for the project.
The most unexpected way to work around the COVID-19 restrictions was seen on the TV series The Blacklist. That show’s production ended early, like many others, and the result was that the season finale was only partially filmed. Their solution was to quickly animate the remaining parts of the episode. It wasn’t perfect, partially owing to the fact that it was rushed to be put together, and it looked a lot like Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead on PS3, and as a result was roundly mocked.
Even if that showed the scars of being rushed to get put together, it does give us an idea of what filmmaking we can accomplish in a pandemic. Animation can be done at home, even if that’s not ideal. There’s no reason why a series can’t be animated, or that you can’t animate a drama that you were expecting to do live action. Those are the only projects where you could, believably, produce them effectively in a socially-distant environment.
There are also plenty of opportunities for documentaries, especially the kind of documentary short that is a staple of the Yorkton Film Festival. There are plenty of stories to tell in 2020, and a lot of them can be filmed with only the most basic crews and equipment. Are we going to see the past year through the lens of a phone camera rather than something more expensive and specialized? Because there are stories to tell, and the advantage to using a phone to tell them is that it’s small, it’s expected, and it can be on the ground level of the massive upheavals happening throughout the world.
This year’s Yorkton Film Festival is happening during a pandemic, but it’s not the pandemic festival. Those are coming, and they are going to reflect the ways that filmmakers reckon with the restrictions they’re forced to work under and the freedoms that come with taking an unconventional approach to their craft. It’s a daunting and scary time for filmmakers across Canada, but I’m excited to see how they tell their stories. And, like always, the Yorkton Film Festival will be a great way to see the results of this unprecedented time in the film industry.
