The shift to online teaching presented new challenges, particularly in a filmmaking course where students usually rely on camera and lighting equipment through the SFU library.

In this course, students were asked to complete several filmmaking assignments focused on resourcefulness and creativity. In one assignment, students were asked to look for, identify and find a way to creatively document and label resources they had at home for creating videos, digital images and special effects. In another, students paired up to create distance portraits, inspired by photographer Kimon Katketsis, in which they used zoom, skype or facetime to create portraits of each other at home.

These assignments were valuable for students to understand how to make the best use of lighting and composition, as well as to understand how the medium used can contribute to the story, in this case: staying at home because of a global pandemic.