Teresa Garratty: Making a Deaf LGBT+ Short Film During a Pandemic

Hello again Limping Chicken readers!

You may or may not have (rude) noticed that I had a bit of a break from writing here. No exciting reason for that, the opposite in fact. Life has just become so boring that there wasn’t really anything to write about! Unless of course waking up, sitting on the edge of the bed and having an existential crisis is news worthy?

To be honest, I’m quite/very cynical and I thought the last thing everyone needs right now is more thinly veiled doom and gloom. But then I got a couple of messages asking if I would be coming back, so I guess you’re all just gluttons for punishment!

So here I am! Today I’m going to try and steer clear of anything too depressing and I’ll talk about something I did last year that was actually quite interesting. Maybe you’ll be inspired, maybe you won’t but it will kill some time and that’s pretty much the only thing on the agenda these days.

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to make another short film during the pandemic. Actually, there were a few reasons. It’s good to stay creative, I needed to keep working and I wanted to create jobs for other deaf people to keep working too. Was it easy? Abso-friggin-lutely not.

You’ve probably started to notice now that TV and film have to abide by social distancing rules, so it’s changing how things look on screen and we can no longer compose shots in the way we would want to.

There are ways around that with perspex screens or camera trickery (you can see an example from our short film here.) but in general, social distancing on top of framing for BSL is resulting in some very strange and limiting shot choices.

It’s also hard work for the actors. Careful blocking and no contact make it very surreal for them to give a natural performance. It’s hard enough to act truthfully under normal circumstances but we’re literally saying to them, “be real in this totally unrealistic scenario”.

For deaf actors this can be even harder as there isn’t a lot of opportunity for practice and those few opportunities are often taken away by hearing actors. The cast of this film (Katie Erich, Chris Laing & Libby Welsh) were fairly fresh talent. They all had some previous acting experience/training but they weren’t the “usual suspects” from the deaf acting community and most importantly they were deaf LGBT+ actors, which was hugely important for the film in terms of representation.

I was so pleased that we could provide opportunities for under-represented deaf actors and they handled their roles with admirable grace and professionalism. We were massively pushed for time and went from the start of preproduction to shooting in the space of about two weeks. In just that short space of time, they rehearsed, translated the script, learnt lines, developed chemistry, followed blocking and built their characters. I’m wearing a beanie hat right now and I take it off to them (only briefly, as it’s bloody freezing right now!).

Something else noteworthy about this project was that for me, it was my first time working as a self-shooting director, which isn’t as morbid as it sounds. What this really means is that I was doing two jobs on set; directing and DoP (director of photography).

A lot of people don’t truly understand what the term “DoP” means and often confuse it with the role of “Camera Operator”, leading to a lot of false DoP credits being thrown around that aren’t really deserved. I’ll try to give a brief explanation but overall a DoP does a lot more than just physically operate the camera.

A DoP will work very closely with the director from early preproduction stages. They will study the storyboard (sometimes have input) to determine what camera, lenses, rigs and lighting are needed to ensure that the final imagery matches the directors intentions and is of the highest possible quality.

They assemble their camera team depending on budget (camera assistants, sound etc) and on set are in charge of planning lighting set ups to be carried out by that team. They view the image in the monitor sort of like a painting, paying attention to detail and altering it until it looks exactly right. In other words, if a “DoP” rocks up on set and says “I don’t really know anything about lighting, can you do it instead?” then honey, that ain’t your DoP. That’s a Camera Op.

So hopefully you now have a better understanding of how much work is involved in DoPing a film, but why the hell did I decide to take on two huge roles for one film? Insanity? In part, yes but mostly for safety reasons and personal frustration.

Safety-wise, we had to minimise the number of crew we were allowed on set to reduce the risk of spreading covid19, so crew members were doubling up and chipping in as and where they could to keep our numbers down.

Frustration wise this was almost a blessing in disguise. DoP opportunities for women in mainstream film and TV are rare and contrary to what you might like to believe, those opportunities are also rare in deaf film & TV. In both deaf and mainstream worlds men like to help men.

Unconsciously or not, they do and if/when they do help women it’s seen as “making an effort”, which is gross for a number of reasons. Bottom line, cameras or any kind of gadgets are seen as “boys toys” and therefore you get inexperienced little boys who have just finished university lining up DoP credits and women who have worked professionally in the industry for over a decade as camera ops/assistants have to practically beg for them.

In deaf film and TV it’s not just a sexism issue either but more often than not those who are not strong BSL users/not born deaf/not part of deaf families/not deaf enough etc, are often overlooked in favour of those who are but I feel that’s probably a whole can of worms that needs to be opened in a different article. Carefully.

I think I’ll wind it down now as you’re probably nodding off with your phone in hand anyway. You can find out more about how we made the film here and watch the final piece here but hopefully you were able to take something positive from all this.

Hopefully it’s proof that even during this God awful pandemic we can still be productive. We can still create opportunities for ourselves and others. Be strong, it’s nearly over.

Read more of Teresa’s posts (with cartoons!) by clicking here.

Teresa is a freelance film maker, photographer and full time cynic. At school, she was voted “Most likely to end up in a lunatic asylum”, a fate which has thus far been avoided. Her pet hates are telephones, intercoms and all living things. Follow her on Twitter as @TGarratty