Francesca's Thoughts

That sounds fancy, doesn’t it. Like I should be wearing a tuxedo and attending premieres in the Prince Charles Cinema. The actual premiere was in one of the theatre spaces at my university, and I found the experience of watching unbelievably uncomfortable. I’m not normally in the room when people read my books! Also I was wearing regular clothing because it was 3pm on a Sunday.

In the three-ish months since I finished Kendra’s Adventures in Influencerland, the main words that come up when people tell me they watched it are ‘uncomfortable,’ ‘unsettling’ and ‘anxious.’ And I say GOOD THAT WAS THE GOAL. Internally I cackle like Muttley from Whacky Races. Then I remember that most viewers haven’t read my books or my short stories and have no idea most of my work does tend to get a bit… weird. I don’t think it should be a shock given that I mostly dress like I’m in the Addams family and spend eighty percent of my life dealing with chronic illness, which if nothing else is great fuel for gallows humour. I also did a philosophy degree with a focus on contemporary and applied philosophy, so basically spent three years thinking about all the weird shit humans do on a regular basis. So. Let’s chat about what inspired Kendra’s story and how I went about filming it.

From Under Which Rock Did Kendra Emerge?

You guys might remember that back in 2020 I was really into minimalism. I still am, because I move a fair bit and because, due to the aforementioned chronic illness, I can’t always do a lot of vacuuming. I’m also terrified of large spiders, and the more crap you have on your floor, the easier it is for the little bastards to sneak up on you. It took until I was 26 to attain an ADHD diagnosis, but I was way younger when I realised that being a clutterbug was a) not ideal for my mental health even if chaos is my natural state, and b) spiders hide everywhere, so tidy up or risk an eight-legged surprise when you move that stack of papers you forgot about.

Back in lockdown I was watching YouTube videos by people who live out of a single backpack and spend months agonising over if they should buy a spoon. I remember thinking that although a lot of extreme minimalists talk about how freeing it is to step away from mass consumerism – it really does not take long to clean a kitchen when you own one saucepan – some of them did not seem particularly free. They were defining themselves by their extremism to the extent that if they purchased another jumper, people in the comments were saying things like ‘you’re not a true minimalist’ and they had to justify needing the jumper. I also got the impression some of the nomadic minimalists were running away from things in their lives – fair enough, the urge to set everything you own on fire and flee to the mountains is one I experience on the reg – which is in itself quite interesting. I remember being struck by the image of a 20-something year old woman sat in a completely empty, echoing room and thinking ‘peace at last’ even as every molecule in her body wanted a few creature comforts, like a bed frame. I tucked the sliver of an idea away for later and went and did my philosophy degree. (And decluttered my stuff.)

Years later in scriptwriting class, we did some free writing and I remembered the extreme minimalism videos and the idea of a woman sitting alone in a monastic cave. I spent a module writing different scenes and getting to know Kendra, thinking about influencer culture (which has gotten more insidious since 2020, but that’s for another conversation) and the ways the internet pushes us to extremes.

How we Filmed Kendra’s Adventures in Influencerland

I wanted to tell the story via screen capture of a livestream, as opposed to traditional actual cameras with microphones and lighting rigs, for two reasons. One, it made sense for the story to step into the world of a viewer. I wanted us to see Kendra as Callum sees her: a wannabe influencer who puts internet clout above family obligations. If we watched Kendra film herself, or even if we watched from the perspective of a casual viewer, there wouldn’t be as much tension and it would be harder to convey the story, which is less about minimalism and more about two siblings with different priorities.

Two, my classmates and I were scheduled to learn how to use the university’s film studio and equipment after the Easter break, but I wanted to film over the fortnight’s holiday because I knew I would need a couple of days afterwards where I didn’t absolutely have to get out of bed. Plus my more equipment-savvy classmates and teaching staff were busy with their own projects so it needed to be something I could physically film by myself. And a YouTube livestream is dead easy to set up – I have the technological know-how of a crane fly and it didn’t take too much thinking to work out how to set up a stream and capture it through a second device. I did chat with people who do actually have technological know-how and they thought that keeping it straightforward was the way to go too.

Here was my super duper high tech plan:

Not pictured: me offscreen on a laptop. I have added that in since:

Is the final product high resolution? No, but how many YouTube livestreams are IMAX quality.

All it took after figuring out filming logistics was to ask my friends to take part, assign them a commenter role and make sure people understood the general concept of a livestream.

In the end we filmed on Easter Saturday, which worked out well because a lot of friends had time off work and, crucially, I did not have to get up the following day. On the downside, a lot of friends also had plans for the long weekend, so I ended up assigning double roles and hopping onto the livestream myself on my phone as well as ‘acting’ as Callum through my laptop.

The pre-production process was fairly straightforward: I set up my desktop computer on a table, scribbled eco messaging on some old cardboard and taped it to the wall facing the camera. I changed certain contacts on my phone to character names and updated my WhatsApp and Google profiles to look like a twenty-something man. I also doctored my entire YouTube channel to look like a minimalist influencer’s, changing names and thumbnails of my tarot reading videos and adding ‘this is for a short film!’ on every description just in case someone really did click looking for an ‘unhaul’ video.

The YouTube livestream was a real stream, running via my channel for an hour or so. In the script, the livestream conversation between Kendra and her viewers begins a few minutes before Callum comes online, so when I started screen capture on my laptop and rang ‘Kendra’ (actually our lovely actress, Elisabeth), she really is interrupted mid-sentence. A friend stepped in to play Barry the Neighbour – he really is messaging back in real time – and everyone COMMITTED to being an internet troll. We did three takes total – the final one was the best, because everyone at that point was entering true troll mode.

Post Production & Stressing Out the Audience (and me)

Everyone who works at every stage of the process says their part is the most crucial. Scriptwriters know you can’t make anything without a script, directors know you can’t make anything without their input, producers are balancing logistics that could fell production at any point and every engineer or editor will point out that the piece is made in the edit. They’re all correct. For Kendra’s Adventures, I had to learn the basics of Premier Pro within about three weeks, because locking down an editor was hard (again, everyone I knew was working on their own pieces), but thankfully I knew a couple of composers and sound engineers who, gods bless their entire lives, volunteered to step in to fix the soundscape.

What needed fixing I hear you ask. Or rather I can’t hear you because the diegetic noise of the original cut is drowning you out.

Diegetic sound is what’s made on-set: actors talking, footsteps, unscripted sneezes. Non-diegetic sound is added later: background music, special effects. Most sound on most films and TV is non-diegetic, because the sound a prop makes on set might not be the right sound for the story. Case in point: the original sound of Barry the Neighbour banging on Kendra’s door was me, knocking on a table. A tiny woman with noodle arms rapping on a plastic table doesn’t sound the same as a grown man pounding on a wooden door, so we added a track in post production. The drum n bass wasn’t there on the day and neither was the calming background music Kendra’s playing to her audience.

We also removed some of the diegetic sound: in the original cut, you can hear pages turning and the tap of keyboard keys because I was six feet away from Elisabeth, keeping an eye on the script and typing into the YouTube comments section as Callum. Elisabeth didn’t use a microphone, partly because it didn’t occur to me it might be helpful – did I mention this is the first time I’ve directed and produced, ha – and partly because Kendra wouldn’t use a professional mic unless she found one discarded in a skip. Plus we filmed in my flat, which is quite echoey due to high ceilings, a main road and the Landlord Special of empty walls and no curtains… the acoustics were never going to be crisp. By ‘we’ I mean my mate Gavin (who has an EP out, go get it) and a fantastic composer called Kris Williams took care of everything. I did have a go at cleaning the audio myself, but as far as I’m concerned sonic art is actually magic. I don’t know if I’ll direct and produce my own work again, but I do know that if I do, I’ll outsource the sound from the get go. The goal with the sound was to ramp up the stress of going viral for the wrong reasons, and Gavin and Kris absolutely nailed it.

The visuals – making Kendra go viral, doctoring views counts and subscription numbers – were completed by me, fuelled by vending machine snacks. A friend showed me how to add images onto the footage in Premier Pro so the livestream comments pop up around Kendra’s head as she’s reading them for maximum intensity. Is it a cluttered and stressful viewing experience? Yes. Hopefully. I wanted viewers to be as stressed as Kendra would be reading all those mean comments. To be fair, adding those comments in the right order made me quite stressed:

Was there an easier way to add the layers? Maybe. Will I ever do anything like this ever again? I really hope not. Not least because my laptop permanently slows down by five percent every time I open Premier Pro.

Anyway, that was pretty much it. Probably twenty to thirty five editing hours between three people, plus a couple of video calls and some voice notes, for less than twelve minutes of footage. Plus however long it took to write, edit, enlist my friends, find an actor, explain the concept to everyone, making props, moving my flat around so we could film, moving it back again and suchlike. Forty eight hours? I’m nicer about bad films and television now, is what I’m saying, because even the truly terrible finished pieces took a lot of work from a lot of people.

Haven’t watched Kendra’s Adventures in Influencerland yet? Here she is, uploaded to YouTube because although I could have faffed about submitting to film festivals, the spiritual home of this piece is definitely YouTube.

Some of my friends’ YouTube usernames are still the ones they made for the livestream, and I still seem to have the Callum character as a profile on my phone. Art really does make its way into the everyday… and everyone who volunteered on this project gets a no-questions-asked favour if they need a body burying, because if this had been a one woman show I’d still be in the foetal position.

Look after yourselves and happy spooky season,

Francesca

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