Eventually, there would be a supporting cast voiced by various friends: a hummingbird, a cat, a cheetah, a mouse and a raccoon. Bennani, who often creates animal narrators for her videos, found a file of 3-D animal models she had bought for a different project, and she and Barki chose two lizards with glossy copper-and-green skin and weirdly soulful black eyes for their avatars. They roamed their neighborhoods, filming street scenes with their iPhones. Barki would jot down her observations and feelings each day - how moved she was by the viral videos of Italians playing music on their balconies, or how disturbing it was to see medical gloves splayed on the pavement - and then she and Bennani would use these details to script a short story about what they were experiencing. She and the filmmaker Orian Barki, who were spending lockdown together between their Brooklyn apartments, conceived a series of short Instagram videos about the changes they were witnessing.

But the first week of quarantine made her restless, and she wanted to create something immediate and raw that captured the way she was feeling. An animator and artist whose work sits at the intersection of homemade YouTube reality shows, hand-drawn cartoons and documentary film, Bennani was used to staying inside, funneling the world through her computer. IN MARCH 2020, when Covid-19 was ripping through New York and the city locked down, Meriem Bennani felt an impulse to make a video.

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