Welcome to the week-by-week version of the Coronavirus Time Capsule. You’re joining hundreds of groups representing thousands of teenagers in recording life in lockdown.

Before you get started:

Download and read the latest version of the Coronavirus Time Capsule Blueprint.

Sign up to the project on our homepage, so we can keep in touch with you (our emails may go into your spam filters, so please check for them and add us to your contacts)

Join our WhatsApp group by clicking on the link in our emails.

Download the relevant safeguarding and project planning resource templates.

As we approach the final weeks of the Coronavirus Time Capsule, we’ve decided to release all the final Topics and tasks together. Anyone doing the project is now free to choose any topic to do on any week.

For the Week 1-11 topics, please scroll down the page.

You can download a full set of Week number and Topic titles here:

Week Numbers | Topic Titles

New Traditions
A visual documentary-style exploration of the new rituals and traditions that we have created in lockdown.

Night Time
Capturing the sounds of night time through audio recording, speech and creative writing.

Entertainment
Hype up the piece of entertainment - film, music, TV, app, trend or board game - that you’ve loved most in lockdown.

Clothes
Create a catwalk featuring your finest lockdown fashions - a dress-down and a dressed-up look.

(Not) Missing Out
A chance to create the events and moments that you missed out on because of lockdown.

Changes
Write a song describing the things that have changed for you, and the world, during lockdown.

Week One is a whole-company task. We want you to create a collaborative opening monologue for your time capsule.

We’ve written the Week One monologue, which will be performed by every group making a Time Capsule (there are spaces to add in details that are specific to you). You should divide the lines in the monologue amongst your group, film them in your homes and then edit them all together.

Here’s our version, including a soundtrack created collaboratively from our bedrooms.

Week 2 resources will be released Saturday 4 April.

Week 2’s Topic is Home Life. We want to get a glimpse of what’s going on at home - images of day-to-day life during shutdown, schedules, feelings and whether things are turning out as expected.

This is a solo task - every participant is invited to interpret it in a way that helps them express something important about their day-to-day life in the shutdown. It’s also their first opportunity to experiment with different ways of capturing things on film and you should encourage everyone to make something that isn’t just talking to the camera (like Week 1).

We asked movement director Kane Husbands, director and writer Sonia Jalaly, and director and musician Nicholai La Barrie to suggest three challenges that might help you come up with ideas. You can find their videos on the Week 2 page on our website.

You can use those video challenges, or make your own, or encourage the participants to interpret the Topic however they like.

See the latest Blueprint for workshop structure and editing notes.

Please ensure you are working in a safe way and that young people aren’t filming things they shouldn’t or sharing too much emotionally complicated content - see our resources section for safeguarding guidance.

A time-lapse movement task
by Kane Husbands

Make a piece of movement or dance that represents the places and positions you have spent the most time in recently.

• Choose an activity (watching TV, being bored in your bedroom, being on your phone, etc).

• Choose five different positions associated with that activity.

• Find an expressive way of moving between them.

• Rehearse so it’s smooth.

• When filming, think about the best camera angle to capture your piece.

Expectations vs Reality task
by Sonia Jalaly

Make a video which represents what you thought lockdown would be like … and what it’s really like.

• Write a list of all the things you thought you’d do during lockdown.

• Write a list of all the things you’ve actually done.

• Select the ones that feel most interesting go together - you could do one or a few.

• Create a very short scene for each one.

• Make two signs saying ‘Expectation’ and ‘Reality’. Use the signs in filming the piece - one expectation followed by a reality.

• When filming, think about transitions between the scenes.

A poetry/music task
by Nicholai La Barrie

Write a piece of poetry or - if you can write music - a song about the feelings you’ve felt during lockdown.

• Write a list of specific emotions you’ve felt during lockdown (it might be useful to write down when, where and why you felt them.

• Turn those emotions into lines. Add detail. Audio record the lines - see our guide on how to audio-record on your phone.

• Film different things in your home that represent the lines. Edit it together if you can, or send it to your leader with clear instructions!

• When filming, think about long shots and close ups, and how to surprise the audience with your images.

Or you could make…

An MTV cribs style guide to your bedroom.

A point-of-view journey around your home.

A tutorial of how to make your classic lockdown meal.

A close-up film of the thing you’ve done most.

A live drawing of a chart representing a normal day.

A line of objects representing different times in your day (with time labels).

A good day v bad day.

 Time-lapse videos of things you’ve watched change in a day (a cake baking, the sun moving in the sky).

A series of dance moves representing different emotions during lockdown.

A description of what home smells/feels/looks like.

Social Media tiles

Notes for Week 2

We’ve been overwhelmed by how many companies signed up to be part of the Coronavirus Time Capsule after our launch and we’ve really enjoyed watching the first wave of companies make their Week 1 videos. Anyone can join the project at any point, so if you haven’t started yet, please don’t worry!

Week 2 is a great first challenge because it’s an opportunity to instil a really key idea of the project: that the pieces made by the teenagers involved should feel like little works of art, rather than just a bunch of young people talking to camera.

There’s loads of value in making a video diary, of course - but we want this project to be about encouraging our participants to think about their situation and find creative ways to express what they’re feeling. It provides for a greater depth of expression and variety.

Some useful phrases in your Zoom workshops and WhatsApp groups this week might be things like ‘can you find a way to represent that’ or ‘how can you show that without saying it’.

We took a short break after launching Company Three’s Week 1 video to let some other companies catch up, so we’ll be making alongside everyone this week - our young people are really excited to get back on it.

Spreading the word

More and more companies are signing up to the project - please help us spread the word. Scroll down to the resources section for images you can use on your site and on social media. The project is open to any group of young people - we want dancers, artists, musicians to make this work through their mediums.

And finally, if you have Spanish speaking connections, please let them know that the Blueprint is now available in Spanish.

(We’d love other translations if anyone can help us).

Ned Glasier | 4 April 2020

Week 3’s Topic is About Us, a closer look at the people making the time capsule at this precise moment in time. We want to give our young people space to say who they are, but also to record some things that might change in the course of the lockdown (like height and hair style).

In order to do this, we’ve created a Lockdown Vital Statistics sheet that we’re going to use in our regular online Zoom workshop with Company Three members. If you’re not running online workshops, the questions on it could be emailed or texted to your company members.

After everyone has filled in their answers, the challenge is then to find fun, innovative ways to film their answers.

This week we’ve made a single video, hosted by Ned and featuring Company Three’s freelance artists answering some of the questions we’ve set. You can use this as inspiration as you plan the delivery of the Topic, or you can share it directly with your group.

See the latest Blueprint for workshop structure, safeguarding and editing notes.

Ned introduces the task for Week 3, with a little help from Abi, Kane, Philip, Nicholai, Nikki and Sonia,

Notes for Week 3

The key to making Week 3 work is finding punchy, fun and snappy images in response to the questions we’ve set in the Vital Statistics sheet. The task should particularly appeal to company members with a healthy Tik Tok or SnapChat habit.

Last week’s task felt a bit unwieldy so we’ve tried to keep it simpler and more focused for this week. If our task doesn’t appeal or fit with your group, please find a different way to respond to the Topic. Try not to move too far away from very specific facts though, because otherwise you might start to preempt future Topics (things like School, Exercise, Social Distancing).

This is probably a week to break the 15 second rule - though it might be worth limiting each person’s answers to, say, 5 seconds each. We are going to chop and edit our final film a lot.

We are particularly keen in this Topic to find out about things that might change over the course of the lockdown - hair style and length, height, sleeping habits. Do add you own if you can think of more.

Ned Glasier | 10 April 2020

Week 4’s Topic is School. We want to better understand what school feels like when lessons are online, teaching is by email and exams are cancelled.

You can approach this task in a number of ways. We’ve suggested five tasks you might use to explore the subject. You could:

• Just use one of the tasks to create a whole-group piece (e.g. an amalgamated letter to school).

• Give everyone a choice of task and make a more fragmented film covering the subject from multiple angles.

• (As always) do your own thing!

The subject of school is one that lots of young people feel passionate about and have clear opinions on. More than any other week, we should be led by them and what they want to express - we hope that lots of teachers and parents will watch the Time Capsules and listen to what their children/students have to say.

This week’s video has been created by Company Three facilitators Abigail Glasser and Philip Morris.

Notes for Week 4

It might be useful this week to use the letter as a structuring device for the other activities.

We used our workshop to gather material for the letter, which we then wrote up and allocated lines from. We then asked our group members to record a line or two of the letter and to also respond to the other tasks.

Another way to structure the edit this week is to simply group the videos by task, with the letter first and the other tasks coming afterwards.

School is such an important subject for our young people - no adults (even teachers) know what it’s like to be educated at home in this way, so it feels really important to make space for your participants to speak about their experiences.

Week 5’s Topic is Social Distancing. There are lots of ways you could approach this (please feel free to interpret it in your own way), but the thing we’re really interested in is what friendships look like in lockdown.

We wanted to find a new form and aesthetic to work in this week, so our artists Nicholai and Nikki have put together a plan to capture the way everyone is managing their friendships these days - on their phones and laptops.

At the heart of this task is a challenge to speak to a friend about something you wouldn’t often speak about - in whatever online programme or app you normally talk to them. This might be Insta, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp or iMessage - or on Facebook, Zoom or Skype. It might just be on a phone call.

Note: We have found it difficult to screen-record Facetime or Video conversations without losing sound. Please read the Blueprint for more information.

You might also choose to use older or more unusual methods of getting in touch: sending letters, using morse code or shouting from your window.

The conversation prompts are:

• Tell them that you miss them.

• Remember a time you were together in person.

• Tell them something you like about them that you’ve never said before.

• Talk about the first thing you’ll do together when you get out of lockdown.

• Make them laugh.

Safeguarding
Asking young people to screen-record conversations with their friends requires careful planning in terms of safeguarding, so please ensure that you have applied your own safeguarding rules to these exercises in line with your own safeguarding policy. You can read ours on page 24 of the Blueprint.

Reference

Notes for Week 5

Over the last few weeks a number of researchers in different fields have been talking about the impact of lockdown on teenagers and the potential importance of social media in helping to counteract this.

This paper by Amy Orben, Livia Tomova and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, the consultant neuroscientist on our production of Brainstorm, warns that the lockdown “might be especially harmful for an age group to whom peer interaction is a vital aspect of development, though they also note that the sophisticated way in which today’s teenagers connect digitally may mean “that face-to-face social deprivation might be less impactful”.

When we first started the Coronavirus Time Capsule we based on three strands that we thought would be important for the teenagers we worked with during the lockdown - offering support, creating a space for self-expression and, possibly most importantly, encouraging connection.

Celebrating the conversations our teenagers are having, and the often maligned ways in which they are having them feels really important in this week’s task.

Ned

Week 6’s Topic is an invitation to let off steam. We want everyone involved in the project to find a way to let loose, get moving and shake things off. This is an opportunity to make a high-octane, fun video and have fun.

Our Producer and sometime choreographer and dance teacher, Nuna Sandy is in charge of this week and her video has a series of suggestions for what letting loose might mean to different people. It’s important that you let everyone do their own thing - you’re not going to let off steam playing football if you hate playing football.

Here are some ways you might let off steam:

• Dancing

• Scribbling

• Yoga

• Shaking

• Messing things up

• Shouting

Nuna has also choreographed a TikTok-style Time Capsule dance. We want some (or everyone) in every group to learn it and we’d love to see it in all of the videos.

Dance Tutorial

Dance practice video

Choose the title that best suits your video!

Notes for Week 6

Coming soon!

Week 7’s Topic is all about food. And, perhaps more importantly, our connection to what we eat and what our meals say about us.

Sonia Jalaly and Angie Peña Arenas have created this week’s task. It’s a food preparation and writing task that should be relatively simple to edit together. There are two stages:

Filming the preparation of a meal (as a top-down video or a time-lapse).

Recording a voice-over about that food.

All the information you’ll need is in V7.0 of the Coronavirus Time Capsule Blueprint and the video below.

Week 8’s topic is about the people we live with.

We got the whole team together to make this week’s task video - making documentaries about our families and housemates.

All the information you’ll need to make your videos is in the latest version of the Coronavirus Time Capsule Blueprint (now in ‘Getting Started’ at the top of this page) and the video below.

Week 9’s topic is a really important one. As adults across the world start to imagine what the world after Coronavirus might look like, we want to hear from the people most likely to be affected by what happens when the pandemic is over.

This week’s video was made by our Artistic Director Ned. If you can, please support his fortieth birthday run, raising funds for Company Three. From the very start we’ve made the Coronavirus Time Capsule free to anyone who wants to take part - we rely on donations to keep it that way.

All the information you’ll need to make your videos is in version 9.0 of the Coronavirus Time Capsule Blueprint (now in ‘Getting Started’ at the top of this page) and the video below.

Lockdown has thrown up all sorts of characters and Week 10 is a chance to capture them for all eternity.

Amber’s video features suggestions for how to make puppets from household objects (thanks to Smoking Apples for the mini-masterclass) and some top voice-acting tips from leading voice coach Hazel Holder.

You can also use Tik-Tok, character acting or animation to capture the stock characters and well-known faces of lockdown.

All the information you’ll need to make your videos is in version 10.0 of the Coronavirus Time Capsule Blueprint (in ‘Getting Started’ at the top of this page) and the video below.

June 2020

We’re asking all groups involve in the Time Capsule to work on the same topic this week if you can. We’re working in partnership with the Wellcome Trust to support a unique 5-year strategy to improve mental health in young people. Everything we make this week will inform a major new report they are writing for UNICEF - a real chance for young people to be heard.

Our video this week is hosted by Naomi Ackie - the BAFTA-nominated star of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Channel 4’s The End of the F**king World.

Step 1
Fill in the anonymous form below with the positive things you’ve started doing in lockdown that have helped your mental health (all participants should do this individually). We’ll collect these together and give them to the Wellcome Trust.

Step 2
Select some of the things you’ve been doing and film yourself creating reminders to keep doing them in the future (see the Blueprint for more information).

Please download this week’s Blueprint for more information and a workshop plan - as well as important information for Group Leaders.

Resources

Mental Health links:

• Mind: Information for Young People

• Young Minds: Coronavirus Support

• Black Minds Matter

Please download and return to us to enable Wellcome to use your video in their research and presentations. Your company will receive a credit in the official UNICEF report.