Dawn Days: The daily lockdown film project that became a mental health lifeline

Lockdown has affected different people in different ways, but it has perhaps been hardest for those living alone. Parents juggling full-time jobs and home schooling duties may scoff, but being stuck in the same place for days on end with only very limited human interaction can take its toll on even the most self-reliant souls. Add a bit of heartache to the mix and – without the possibility of therapeutic physical contact with friends and family – it’s easy to see how things could get pretty dark, pretty quickly.

Just another Portobello sunrise... PIC: Mike Guest

This was the position Edinburgh-based photographer and filmmaker Mike Guest found himself in towards the end of March, when, having experienced troubles in his personal life and been forced to abandon an exciting, globe-trotting project with innovative outdoors brand Patagonia, he found himself back in his Portobello flat with way too much time on his hands.

“I moved back into the flat and I just sat on the floor and my world was spinning,” he says. “I just sat there thinking f***, I’ve not spent time on my own for 21 years. I’ve just kept moving – and I’ve been happy, but ultimately I’ve never learned how to live with myself, how to sit with myself and deal with my thoughts.”

Help, however, came in an unlikely form.

“At the end of April I was on a phone call to another photographer, Nick Pumphrey – we know each other through the whole surf network. At the end of the call he said ‘Do you know what? I think I’m going to swim out [to sea] every day of May, at dawn, at the blue hour, and shoot until the sun comes up.’ I was like: ‘That’s pretty cool, I might join you – you’re gonna do it in Cornwall, I’m gonna do it in Scotland.’ And that was it.”

In Edinburgh at this time of year, getting up at dawn means getting up early – a whole hour earlier than in Cornwall. At the start of May Guest was getting up at 4:15am; then he realised that nautical first light is even earlier than first light on land, so by the middle of the month 3:30am starts were the norm.

“When I went down on the first morning I was just going to take photos because I really want to work on my abstract water photography,” he remembers. “But then I was bobbing around and I started thinking, ‘I’ve got this amazing camera, and video-wise I want to understand it more,’ so I started shooting video too.”

When he got home, Guest edited together some of the images he’d captured, “put a bit of music over it, a bit of ambiance” and then posted the resulting film on his social media channels. He called the project Dawn Days. The response was dramatic: dozens of positive comments from people locked down in cities with no way of accessing big horizons telling him his films were keeping them going. As the days passed, the films became more ambitious, and then musical collaborators started getting involved.

“I started by just pulling free music off the internet,” says Guest, “but then my friend Barry Jackson, a sound engineer who lives nearby, gave me this half-finished album and said ‘go for it’. Then he started making me loops on synthesizers – just really mellow, calm tones. He would come back from work [at the BBC in Glasgow] and he would start making stuff for me. He would start vibing off the video from the day before, and more often than not, his vibe would match the weather, and it would match the way I was feeling – it was weird.”

Other musicians got involved too, notably Colin Macleod and Julie Fowlis. “I cheekily tagged Julie Fowlis on one of my posts,” says Guest. “I love Julie’s music, her voice is amazing, I don’t speak Gaelic but there’s a lot of Gaelic stuff about Selkies and she was totally into it. She said ‘OK, I’ll have a think,’ and then she came back with this track.

“I listened to it obsessively that day and then I went down to the beach past Joppa to this bell tower. I was sat at the edge of the water, and I was listening to this tune and just I broke into tears. I was so affected by that music and all the other stuff I’d been dealing with.

“Then I went out and filmed with a lens combination I probably shouldn’t have, but it meant I had to concentrate, I had to really relax and hold my posture right and just focus...and ultimately that’s what this has turned into – a mental health project.”

Mike Guest catching some early morning rays PIC: Mike Guest

Even though May is now over, Guest is planning to keep his dawn filming sessions going at least once a week. “I’m really lucky – that’s something that I mustn’t ever forget, I’m really lucky to be able to just walk down the road and do this. Because there are a lot of people who can’t.”

To see all Mike Guest’s Dawn Days films, visit https://www.mikeguest.co.uk/dawn-days or follow mr_guesty on Instagram