The Covid 19 outbreak is knocking everyone for six, and the TV and communications industry is feeling this particularly hard.
When a sports events gets cancelled, the army of technicians brought in to film it loose a day or twos work. That work makes up their regular income with no hope of getting that anything else as nothing else is shooting. There are some shows that are rightly halting production, but others are finding ways to carry on working.
It’s also vitally important to keep corporate communications flowing during this period, to keep staff and clients abreast of what is happening.
What follows are some ideas you can use to help provide staff and clients with regular updates during the crisis.
Podcasting is really easy and a very effective way of communicating. It is very easy record a podcast with all the contributors at home. All it needs is everyone to have a laptop, headset or smartphone. Its also very cheap. We can even record Skype or Webex calls and meetings.
Animation along with a voice over is a bit more expensive, but it can be done relatively simply and the people involved can all work from home.
Create videos with stock footage and a voice over. It’s not the answer to every production but with careful scripting and good research you can tell a very interesting story using material available online. Many voice over artists have recording facilities at home so again this can all be done in absolute safety.
Use your own archive if need be. Over the years you could easily have developed a library of material and that can often be reused for covering over voice overs.
Webcasting is very simple to do these days and can be done at any location with a small crew. And its easy to include multiple people via phone, Skype etc.
And if all else fails; here are some tips to shoot safely if you need to film.
Sounds obvious but use local crew. We have contacts around the globe and can find crews in most places in the UK, Europe and the US. The footage is then sent to the edit via the internet removing the need for couriers etc.
Make sure the crew use a boom mic for audio as opposed to a clip mic, this means there is no physical contact.
Using minimal crew and kit to minimise contamination.
Use somewhere large such as a hotel as a location, this enables everyone involved to maintain a safe distance.
Using longer focal length lenses on the camera. This means the interviewee can be further from the camera.
If need be shoot outside, such as on someone’s drive, garden, on the street or a park.
And remember all the tools to enable remote post production already exist, we are regularly using them to great effect. The new breed of collaboration apps are very effective and allow people to watch videos on laptops or tablets, make comments and for those comments to be fed back to the production teams.
If we can be of any help please do not hesitate to get in touch.