Covid City. Amsterdam.
“I remember working on this big commercial job in Amsterdam. We were all working as normal, and then during lunch, someone said, ‘My husband just called and he said all the toilet paper is gone from the supermarkets. People are going nuts'. Everybody was laughing onset saying this whole Corona thing will fly over and nothing will happen! Ten minutes later we heard that there was a press conference scheduled and we were going into a hard lockdown. I was right in the middle of doing this big commercial, working 16 hour days, so I pretty upset when it all ended.”
“So, from one moment, till the next, everything just changed. The next day my phone rang and all my jobs were cancelled. I had no work whatsoever. That was such a weird moment for me, to experience working onset having a good time making jokes about the toilet paper, to then having no work at all. People were just scrambling because suddenly everything was gone.”
“I was just thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?' To keep my head straight I started to do a walk around the city everyday. Two minutes away from my front door was the metro station, so I just jumped on at the train station and got out at Vijzelgracht.”
“This is where the I shot the escalator shot. I would do the very same route everyday. I got on the metro, went to the city center, got out at five o'clock and walked through Dam Square in Amsterdam, and then walked back home. It was like a two hour walk in total.”
“Whenever you walk in Amsterdam, your focus has be on what happens at ground level. If you shift your focus from what is happening right in front of you, you're gonna get hit by a taxi or a bike! So when I was walking around during these Covid times, I could for the very first time look up.”
“I suddenly noticed all these buildings I hadn't seen before, and everything was so beautiful. It was just a really interesting way of seeing my city. I saw Amsterdam from a different perspective. If it's empty, you start looking around more because you don't have to be focused on what's happening around you at ground level.”
“After I'd explored the city a couple times, I thought about all of the weird things I was seeing. Right in the middle of Dam Square, in the heart of the city, there was this guy dressed as the Grim Reaper. He would just stand that everyday all day long. It was so weird. There was nobody else there, just him. So I thought, next time I am in the city, I'll just take my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K with me. And that's sort of how this project evolved.”
“The reason I went for the escalator shot at Vijzelgracht, was because I've been there so many times in my life and I've never witnessed it without people. It is always packed with people. There is not a second during the day, that escalator is empty. The next weird thing I noticed, is with all of the tourists and people missing from Dam Square, the pigeons, began to take over.”
“The whole of the square was just packed with pigeons and one single lone Grim Reaper. Amsterdam has experienced three out breaks of plague, centuries ago. So it just gave me goosebumps thinking about what must have happened here in the past! I found that whole time in my life so weird. So I just wanted to capture life at that time and then to look back at 20 years from now.”
“I had nothing else to do with my life other than just shoot scenes in the city. I remember sitting in Dam Square for one hour just shooting the pigeons, to get the right shot. It must have looked really funny to the Grim Reaper with me sitting in my ‘Asian squat pose' just waiting for the pigeons to come closer. When they did, it was just awesome. It was an achievement of sorts during a pretty scary time in life.”
“The shot of the pigeon's head, I shot in 4K on my Sigma Art 50-100mm lens, with the camera sitting on the ground. Mostly I was shooting at 400 ISO in 12:1 compression, because back then, I only had one SSD and I didn't have cards. I had absolutely had no money for anything, so I tried to keep my footage as small as possible. I know now that Q5 actually creates a lot smaller files, but that's how I learned these things.”
“I was pretty much doing this walked everyday for two months. I've never walked so much in my life. After a time, I also started running as well, because I wanted to do workouts. Suddenly I was running 15 km, because I was just wanted to keep on exploring the city. I would start at my front door and just run all around Amsterdam. I kept exploring, for months. I can honestly say I've seen every street in Amsterdam now. It was so interesting. All empty and silent.”
“I really enjoyed this project, because it gave me a purpose during the lockdowns. I wanted to show the emptiness of being in the city. For me, the escalator shot became my symbol of Amsterdam during Covid 19.”
