Instead of switching to another poem, we switched to another director – the Oscar-winning Kevin Macdonald, who happens to live down my road. I had been to Kevin’s house just a few days before lockdown and remembered having staircase envy. I called and asked him whether he had a film camera at home and whether he would shoot a lockdown poem for us. Rather wonderfully, two days later, he sent us the footage of his staircase, complete with the stair-climbing legs of his son Isaac. With everything filmed, we turned to the sound. We hadn’t planned for music because we thought a voice reading the poems would be enough. But then I recorded myself doing a (bad) read of Birds on my iPhone and placed it against Steven’s edit. When we watched it, we wondered if it sounded a little bit empty. Cue a few hours laying some different tracks against the edit on dear old Garageband, ending when I lucked upon a soft synth opening from a Sufjan Stevens song that sounded like a beam of morning sunshine. Inspired by this, we contacted two tremendous musicians, JeanGa Becker and Pentagram’s Yuri Suzuki. Within five days, they had created a suite of soft, happy hooks played on a variety of old synths in their homes. These pieces score each film with a real sense of warmth and lightness. While JeanGa and Yuri were making music, our go-to sound designer Iain Grant got to work, creating the sound effects and atmospheres that would make the poems sound convincingly domestic. Iain declared that – in the spirit of the project – he would avoid library sounds and record all the effects inside his home. And so he did, recording ticking clocks, clinking cutlery rattles, crisps being crunched, biscuit packets being opened, showers running and stairs creaking. When I observed that his stair creak was too subtle and suggested he resorted to a sound library, Iain refused (his exact words were “you’re killing me”) and found a more vehement stair creak outside a neighbour’s flat. The last part of the sound was the voice. Because Henry’s poems are a mixture of profoundly humorous and humorously profound, and the humour was an important part of alleviating the lockdown gloom, we toyed with the idea of asking a comedian to voice them. I even messaged Emily Oberman to see if she had any Saturday Night Live comedians in her pocket. Her reply was spot on. “Just use Henry, like last time. His voice is great.” And so Henry recorded the poems on a portable voice recorder in his home, adding character in the way that only Henry can – with the gentle, guileless warmth and humour he brings to his poetry.