One of the good news stories over the last few months in Canada is that riding bicycles is more popular than ever. Sales are booming. Roads are being repurposed for cycling traffic. Bike share ridership is up and repair shops can barely keep up with the demand. Empty streets and clearer skies during shelter-in-place orders have highlighted the benefits of cycling as a form of transportation and the need for additional infrastructure in urban areas.
Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge
It was this concept that led us to producing 60 Day Cycle, a depiction of a lone cyclist pedalling through the empty streetscape of Vancouver and past its deserted landmarks. As time passes, the cyclist begins to see signs of the city waking from its slumber; shop owners placing sandwich boards on the sidewalk, artists painting murals, spaced lineups into grocery stores stretching around a city block. The city soon begins to animate and opens up to a new reality.
Commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 60 Day Cycle was filmed in April and May, 2020 as Vancouverites lived through and began to emerge from the social distancing measures that were put in place to combat COVID-19. Both aerial and ground footage was primarily captured by Anthill Director and Vancouver resident Colin Jones, who spent many hours working solo in the empty streets of the city in PPE equipment.
“I felt I had an obligation to capture the eerie feeling of what it was like travelling through the streets of Vancouver, on the Skytrain and inside the airport terminal with absolutely no one around,” says Jones. “COVID-19 has changed the world, and we wanted this piece to contribute to the historical record.”
Since models were not available to hire in April, 2020, Anthill Films’ sound designer Jonathon Osborne stood in for the shoot
The need to work together, while maintaining social distancing and safety protocols, presented a few challenges. Luckily Anthill’s crews are used to working independently in remote spaces. But when that wasn’t possible, a bit of ingenuity allowed the crew to adapt quickly. Jones constructed a homemade remote camera mount using the Freefly Movi stabilizer that allowed him to travel around the city and capture shots while remaining inside his truck when it was parked. The team also really wanted to capture the feeling of moving through the empty city on a bike. So a second camera operator was added to control panning, zooming and focus from a special compartment inside a truck that had been sealed off with heavy duty plastic.
For many of the landscape and lifestyle shots, Jones only had a rough idea of what he was looking for and had to rely on opportunities presenting themselves in real time.
“It wasn’t like shooting real estate, tourism products or anything staged,” says Jones. “I knew the cheers for frontline workers would happen every day at 7 p.m., but for almost all the other shots I didn’t know what I was going to shoot until I was shooting it. When businesses began to open up again, the city changed character fast. It was a scramble to capture as much of that as I could.”
As British Columbia begins to return to its new normal, we hope the uptick of bicycle use during the global pandemic will have a lasting effect. Watch and share 60 Day Cycle now on the NFB’s Facebook page.