Every team in the Guardian probably thinks they’ve been affected the most by the Covid pandemic, but those of us in the video department believe we are the the ones who have had to dramatically change how we do our journalism the most.

You can’t make a good video down a phone line, it’s preferable by far to have two staff on a shoot, and you need to get close to people to provoke empathy in viewers. You need to travel to the story, you don’t really want contributors’ faces hidden when interviewed, and you can control filming conditions much better inside than outside.

Covid challenged all this wisdom, but this has been a positive experience in a lot of ways. The virus has made us more creative because we have had to deal with all these factors, and I think our output has been all the better for that lateral thinking.

Initially, when Covid became an issue in early March, the big challenge was kit – our team share a collection of cameras, and edit our videos on specialist desktop machines that work with dedicated on-site servers. In a few days in March, we had to scramble together laptops and new storage options, and say goodbye to each other. The team had to work out if their domestic wifi was good enough to download and upload massive video files. I have still not seen most of the video team in person, and they have worked admirably in carving out spaces in their flats and houses which they could turn into makeshift video editing spaces.

In the early days of the pandemic, our solution was to use Hangouts/Zoom/Skype for interviews and hope for the best. The results can be seen in our Anywhere But Westminster series, Owen Jones’s interviews, and Iman Amrani’s conversations with our audience about an emerging “new normal”.

This was a spring of giving a unique insight into our presenters’ lockdown homes. We also relied on contributors filming their own lives, which many did with great skill, and there is a fascinating conversation that has been stimulated for us in the honesty it brings to the screen.

We will always need video journalists with fresh ideas, though, and the Anywhere But Westminster team had a very bright idea to replicate their spontaneous street voxpop style. John Harris and John Domokos would roam town centres on Google Earth and then phone businesses that looked interesting to them. People were just glad to have someone showing interest, and the Johns know how to get a conversation about the state of modern Britain going, whatever the technology.

However, a fuzzy person on a video call can only sustain our audience with a certain amount of interest. Guardian videos need to show interesting things and take us observationally into peoples’ lives. Plus, this story was not only happening in the UK. Covid was affecting almost every person on earth, and we needed to be the eyes of our audience, taking them from their lockdown living rooms to as many different places as possible. The evergreen nature of YouTube discovery would mean that the videos we made would be, for many, the definitive visual document of the 2020 pandemic.

We increasingly linked up with a global network of freelance filmmakers and video journalists who were pitching stories about what was happening on their streets. We covered the pandemic in Brazil, Lebanon, Italy, China, Kenya, Greece, Norway, and elsewhere, and tried to create a sense of a global visual moment. Working with them has brought a greater diversity of voices to our video, and that has been a real positive of 2020.

Since the summer, our team of in-house video journalists have been on the road more, with Anywhere But Washington, Modern Masculinity, and a new (as yet unreleased) series on fertility in Europe being filmed on location.

Being out there filming people face to face is what many of our video journalists do instinctively, and the result is always more meaningful than filming remotely. It was not simple though – we are now experts in Covid risk assessment documents, confidently predicting that social distancing can be maintained in the narrow streets of a favela, or at a packed Donald Trump rally.

We have relied on the local knowledge of expert video journalists who can tell us about regional attitudes towards lockdown regulations, and that collaboration has been a great experience. We have also relied on the common sense of our team to avoid risky situations, not least Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone making the Anywhere But Washington series. On election night, they found themselves at a Trump campaign party full of maskless elderly Floridians and as the room got busier, they decided they had to loiter outside instead. In the last election, this would have been a prime opportunity to canvass the room. This time, the image of Oliver looking through the glass said all we needed to know.

All of us have been learning on the job as scientific knowledge about Covid’s transmission developed, and masks, handwash and ensuring good ventilation have become second nature. Some things have remained constant, however, especially Sarah Boseley’s seven (so far) explainer videos on the virus. The first, in January 2020, was recorded in a studio at the Guardian offices in Kings Place. There were more in March, as Sarah’s tone remained calm but became increasingly concerned. During lockdown, she was recorded online. By the last one, in November about the new vaccines, she was back in the studio. Nikhita Chulani and our reactive video team have worked with Sarah to create a visual document of the rise and (hopefully) fall of Covid.

These explainers, and the authoritative tone of them, have an amazing ability to cut through to a YouTube audience which might ordinarily be suspicious, and most of them have been made by producers working on laptops from their homes. Whether it’s Sarah in her living room, or video contributors halfway across the world, we have learned that it all comes back to giving our audience an honest picture of this unique year, and documenting it for future viewers when things go back to normal.

Our year in film: voices from Guardian video

“As a writer and researcher, I was becoming increasingly tired of the monolithic stereotypical depiction of Somalis both in literature and film. We hoped to make a visually cinematic short film exploring an authentic insight into the Somali culture.

“Upon meeting Alice, we instantly knew we wanted to create a film that told a story about young Black Muslim women as those stories are rarely told. The highlight for me was collaborating with so many amazing women on this project. During filming, we laughed a lot, shared frustration, and ultimately felt inspired and hopeful.” Awa Farah, film writer and producer behind Somalinimo, the Guardian’s short film about four British-Somali students at Cambridge University

“I felt very privileged to have access to important stories as they were unfolding, and the ability to tell people’s stories – even if we didn’t have the freedom to use our usual methods.

“At times I was torn between the impulse to travel to tell a story, to go and meet people and hear what they had to say, and the feeling that the restrictions meant it could be irresponsible to do so.

“In recent months I’ve been to Wales, Bradford, Leeds and Liverpool. The whole point of the Modern Masculinity series is that it connects with people, and I think the video format makes it easier to communicate the emotions behind a story to the viewer. It’s rare that I find myself in tears in front of the camera, but listening to people’s stories in lockdown was so difficult and moving that it was sometimes impossible not to. Nothing sums up where we’re at as a society quite so much as the sight of Neil Smedley, a barber in Leeds, reflecting on how his business and his mental health has been impacted by Covid-19.” Iman Amrani, video journalist and presenter

“I’ll skip all the adjectives you’ve read about change during 2020, because none do it justice.

”It’s often felt like one thing after the next – as it has for us all – during the biggest news year in many of our lifetimes, but it’s truly been a privilege to have had this purpose despite the universal and unsettling uncertainty. Reading feedback from our viewers on how our video reports and explainers have helped provide them with a unique and thoughtful insight or the reassurance that they have been missing has been so rewarding for us as a team.

“Of course, 2020 has presented each of us with an entirely new set of video challenges – (does anyone have good wifi or enough harddrives?) – but it has also pushed us forward and strengthened our resolve to hold power to account and to engage and inform our audience in new detailed, dynamic and imaginative ways, on our website, YouTube and all our social media platforms.” Nikhita Chulani, the Guardian’s editor for breaking news and sports video