The project was assembled within the scope of about three days. I wanted to use the opportunity to express some of the feelings, sentiments and takeaways that I’d had bottled up over the past year of more pandemic quarantine.

Like many in early 2020, I was suddenly faced with the prospect of leading a nearly entirely digital life, vs being able to break things up with a commute to work, group film project or live music event. Being stuck inside with the news wasn’t great as well. The day of the insurrection at the Capitol is still fresh in my mind as being one of the more surreal moments of 2020. In the moment, I’d thought what I was hearing was the hyperbole of the press, rather than a real thing that was happening in my lifetime. The event made clear to me that my country was struggling deeply within itself. And that there was, perhaps, a problem. I believe that hardships are tests for us. We are challenged to approach them in different ways, and the way we individually emerge from those challenges is diverse. With that in mind, This Has Been a Test is centric to the idea of how we—as a collective body of humanity—approach challenges, change, and existing together. There is also a great deal of my own cynicism and snark, which as always is to be taken with a grain of salt.