'Covid Confessions': One filmmaker’s journey to capture a global crisis

"Covid Confessions": One filmmaker's journey to capture a global crisis

When COVID-19 hit, Minneapolis-based independent filmmaker Alec Fischer instantly lost all his clients, so he drew his attention to what he thought would be a short 10-minute documentary on how the pandemic was impacting frontline workers in Minnesota.

In the end, Alec featured more than 335+ workers across 40 industries in a multi-part documentary series called " Covid Confessions", which he has been releasing free to watch on YouTube. Each of the 26 episodes so far focuses on a different industry, from nurses and teachers to Olympic and Paralympic athletes, elementary school students, classical musicians, and drag performers.

The series - which Alec created as a team of one with a total budget of under $10,000 - has received widespread international attention for its authentic portrayal of how the pandemic significantly affected all kinds of industry professionals in its first 18 months. "Covid Confessions" was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Journalism and won an EWA National Award for Education Reporting as well as five regional Emmy Awards. It also led to Alec making the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the media category.

We sat down with Alec to find out about his workflow filming and editing the hundreds of hours of footage for " Covid Confessions". It's another powerful example of how Adobe Premiere Pro and the surrounding Adobe video ecosystem - with time-saving AI-powered features - helps filmmakers and video creators around the world achieve their vision and deliver compelling storytelling.

How did you get into filmmaking and video editing?

I've been making films since middle school and initially started making short horror films with friends in 7th grade. We had a lot of fun playing with lighting, sound effects, and clever camera angles. It allowed me to experiment with the practice of filmmaking in a really free form.

Then I created my first documentary as a senior project in high school. Based on my own personal experiences, I traveled across Minnesota and interviewed students about their experiences with being bullied and having suicidal thoughts. It was my first foray into project management and having to sort and edit a large amount of footage. The film went viral in the Midwest, and I ended up touring for around three years, speaking at schools, communities, and city governments about the importance of creating safer spaces for students in their classrooms.

The film helped shift legislation in Minnesota, which made me realize that a documentary can be a really effective catalyst for social change. I really enjoy the accessibility of it, too: You just need a camera - regardless of brand, price, or quality level - to start recording. When you sit down with someone and are able to hear their story, there's something very honest and raw about that experience. It's what I love most about making documentaries. From then on, I became really passionate about telling stories from the Midwest.

How did "Covid Confessions" come about?

When the pandemic hit, I had a lot of conversations with friends who were nurses, teachers, or even restaurant staff who felt like the coverage that they were getting on mainstream news networks wasn't really reflective of their personal experiences. I knew their stories needed to be told and decided to create a short film to let them process emotionally what was happening and how their industry was directly being impacted.

I got access to a warehouse space from a friend who wasn't using it for production at the time, borrowed their cameras, and set up a little makeshift area to film for the day. Some of these folks talked to me for hours, and I realized they needed to feel seen and heard. They connected me with more people to interview, and it grew from one short film to a series of episodes covering a different industry in each one. After a month, I'd filmed around 60 to 70 people.

It then became almost like a challenge for myself: What if I set 12 months aside and see how many people and how many industries I could capture? In the end, I filmed 330 people across 40 industries between 2020 and 2021. And to source these interviewees, I talked with around 3,000 people about their experiences during the pandemic, whether they were on camera or not.

Alec filmed all interviews for "Covid Confessions" in a warehouse between 2020 and 2021.

What was your set up for filming the interviews?

I filmed each interview in 4k with Sony A7S III cameras. Initially, I had three cameras capturing each interview from a variety of angles, but I quickly realized the amount of footage was going to be way too heavy, so I cut down to two cameras for all interviews.

Executing this project as a team of one, my biggest challenge during the interviews was focusing on the subject's story and staying engaged with intentional questions while also trying to check on mic levels, dual camera focus, and lighting stability.

When the 12 months were over, I had hundreds of hours of interview footage and needed to deep dive into editing it. That's been the last 3.5 years.

How did you organize and manage the footage?

The editing was a one-person venture as well. I used Premiere Pro and Media Encoder to ingest and create proxies for every interview, again allowing for ease of handling the total footage.

For the 330+ interviews, I was dealing with more than 128 TB of footage across 16 hard-drives - not including backup drives! Having the ability to convert to proxy format allowed the edit to actually be manageable on my home office desktop.

While editing, I imported and generated proxy files for five to six episodes worth of interviews at a time to keep it manageable. Once I finished those episode edits, I'd start the process again. I also color-coded each interview subject's footage. As a result, each episode had its own unique color spectrum based on which subjects' narratives were moving the story forward. It was really fun because the final edits looked like micro art pieces.

And what was your video editing workflow like?

For the edit, I split each episode into its own siloed folder and reviewed footage by just manually watching through it and by using Text-Based Editing in Premiere Pro. That feature alone probably saved 8 to 10 hours, if not 15, per episode.

I'd then mark moments that stood out to me and pull out each usable sound bite into a "story" sequence. Each episode, which contains between five to 15 interviews, would end up with its own sequence of sound bites - most averaging about six to seven hours worth of footage from the interviews.

From there, I'd group more specific sound bites together into thematic categories and eventually end up with a rough cut of eight to 15 minutes. Finding the narrative "flow" for each episode and allowing subjects' sound bites to weave into one another was key to finding balance and overall story arcs. That's something I'm really proud of with this series: If the constructed narrative order didn't feel like it flowed naturally from one theme into the next, I had to either cut the segment or rework until it did.

After getting the edit into a final draft, I'd apply Lumetri color adjustment layers and masks to the footage to create a fully black background and isolate the subject to make it look really impactful. Though I filmed in a blank warehouse space, there still had to be adjustments made to ensure each background looked the same across all interviews. For about half of the interviews I filmed, where lighting didn't turn out as expected, I had to manually go in and create masking keyframes outlining each subject.

I also used keyframe automation in Premiere Pro to move alongside the subject throughout the clip. This was easily the most time-intensive process, as some subjects were extremely animated and creating tracking keyframes around their movements required a mixture of manual and automatic adjustments. The first few episodes took weeks just trying to figure out best practices with creating and inserting tracking adjustment mask layers. Now I have the primary editing process down to about six days for an episode.

How easy was it to edit the audio and then to export your final edits with Premiere Pro?

I wanted to maintain the warehouse vibe, specifically the echo that was recorded on a boom mic during the interviews, but also wanted to remove white noise and extra conditions around specific interviews that were distracting. I found that applying noise reduction across the majority of the interviews helped achieve that goal.

And then, with numerous distribution avenues for the series, I needed the ability to export in several different formats for each episode. Public television had requirements around file size and visual codecs, Snapchat had requirements around audio limits and internal file specifications, theatrical DCP packages required their own set of standards, and then digital and social media was more flexible. Premiere Pro allowed me to export in all of the different formats, and it felt really easy to navigate.

As I had to do everything myself, it was really helpful that I was able to do it all within Premiere Pro. It was very efficient and also accessible for me, because the budget for this independent project was very low. For each episode it was just around $400 to $500, and I could do it all with my Premiere Pro subscription, without having to spend money on other services.

Editing Tracking (left) shows how Alec kept tabs on what needed to be done for each episode in the edit, while Subject Tracking (right) shows how he used a whiteboard to keep track of the subjects and which episodes they'd appear in.

Why do you think "Covid Confessions" struck such a nerve?

The majority of interviews highlighting worker experiences during the pandemic at the time were done over Zoom, or they were people calling into news stations. So I received a lot of immediate attention within the journalism community because the interviews provided space for workers to authentically process in a raw format that most news organizations weren't able to do due to safety restrictions.

People weren't producing videos in that way at the time: It was just me and the interviewee in a warehouse space, adhering to all the social distancing and safety protocols. It was really intimate and a unique opportunity. If I had a crew of four or five people, we wouldn't have been able to film when we did.

Can you share one Premiere Pro tip for fellow filmmakers?

Don't be afraid to play around with the features in Premiere Pro. Try something different that you maybe weren't initially expecting to use and explore how the software can help you achieve your vision for your final product. Premiere Pro opens up so many options for making adjustments, however small.

In the end, trust your gut on the stories that you want to tell, even if it feels like the resources aren't there at the start. Initially, I couldn't get any funding for "Covid Confessions" and had to self-finance the series. Despite that major obstacle, I self-published on YouTube and within a year was nominated as a global finalist for the Online Journalism Awards next to a series by the New York Times!

If you have a gut reaction towards a story, you'll find a way to make it happen. I've had a reaction like that to every project that has helped me grow as a filmmaker. I just figured out how to make them work. I didn't have any money for the documentary on bullying and suicide prevention that I did in high school. Looking back, the film had numerous technical issues, and you could tell I was still figuring out some filmmaking basics with audio and lighting. Despite that, the story was so powerful that it transcended the technical ability that I had at the time.

So don't get too caught up in the technical requirements because the story is really what you need. Focus on bringing it into the world.

Try the latest video-editing features by updating your Premiere Pro app today. And just announced at Adobe MAX, experiment with the all new Generative Extend in Premiere Pro (beta) powered by the Firefly Video Model. To enhance your workflow even further, explore the many integrations that are available as part of the Adobe Video ecosystem.