Movies How Will Hollywood Restart Production After The Pandemic?

[skillzdadirecta]

Hollywood wrestles with how to film in a Post Pandemic World.

 

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Right now, studios, producers and union members are trying to come up with a new, social-distanced way of doing business. On April 13, the Directors Guild of America tapped “Contagion” director Steven Soderbergh to lead a task force to determine when work can resume. He will speak with epidemiologists and guilds to help plan the path forward. But industry discussions aren’t limited to a possible start date. They’re trying to establish new standards. Among the ideas being considered are a push to take crew members’ temperatures before they enter a studio lot. There’s also a move to test employees to see if they have antibodies that would indicate they have some immunity to the virus. They’re also looking into the possibility of instituting waves of testing for cast and crew to see if anyone has been infected. “There’s a recognition that the economy has to get restarted and that too long a period of sequestration could be really damaging,” says Doug Steiner, owner of Steiner Studios, a Brooklyn-based production facility. “But I’m not sure people can go back to work until we know for sure who is sick and who is immune.” Other precautions are being considered, such as mandating that all employees stay in hotels or assigned housing and isolate themselves from friends and family for the duration of a shoot.

 

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“You may have to create a tightly controlled production environment,” says Elsa Ramo, managing partner at Ramo Law and an attorney who has represented Imagine Entertainment and Skydance. “Think of it as a summer camp for movies.”

Further measures will have to be put in place, such as providing crew members with masks and gloves, instituting extra cleaning shifts and ensuring that makeup artists and hairdressers dispose of brushes and other tools once they use them on an actor. It will also require productions to ask probing medical questions of their employees so they can assess their exposure to the coronavirus. In turn, these productions have an obligation to keep their staff informed about any outbreaks, something experts say doesn’t violate privacy laws.

 

Yeah I have no idea how this is gonna work especially for low budget/indie productions. Sucks too because I was just getting back into directing myself... I directed a commercial for a dating app right before the shut down happened and I was planning on directing a short this summer. No idea how that's gonna happen. I'm lucky nobody got covid from my early March shoot... we shot in a bar with like 25 actors not including crew. In NEW JERSEY. 

[skillzdadirecta]

The UK Film Industry is dealing with similar issues

 

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The Inward Investment Group, which itself has legal and VFX/post-production sub-divisions, is working “intensely” with the BFI on getting UK cameras rolling again. The outreach includes all the U.S. studios, including Netflix and Amazon, and UK hubs such as Pinewood and Warner Bros. Leavesden.

Wootton explains, “Our intention is to produce a robust code of practice and protocols, covering best practice on set, insurance, risk, liability, medical advice, travel and more. The manual will help us build our argument to government that we have a recovery plan and can get back to work.”

 

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The hustle is understandable. Billions of dollars are at stake. Last year, production spend in the UK surged to $4.7BN (£3.6BN), a 16% increase on the previous record. Hit shows such as The Crown, His Dark Materials and Killing Eve, and movies including No Time To Die and Venom 2, helped supercharge the business. Netflix signed a long-term deal to make Shepperton its de facto UK production hub and Disney entered a similar deal at Pinewood. The content created at those and other UK hubs then dominated at the box office and online. This year, however, those numbers will plummet. Production has stopped across the country – The Batman, The Little Mermaid, Fantastic Beasts 3, The Witcher and Sex Education are among impacted films and series – and cinemas are closed. Wootton is hopeful that the consultation for the guidelines can be completed within weeks. Once they are drawn up, they will be vetted by UK health authorities. In an ideal world, he says production might begin again in a matter of months, though the UK government has yet to announce any exit plans from the lockdown.

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

With the unions there’s going to be plenty of pressure to keep production safe too. 
 

good news is for anything in modern day, if the real world is still social distancing a production won’t need as many extras. 

[Bloodporne]

Clearly cardboard cutout extras is the way to go. 

[Remarkableriots]

49 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

Clearly cardboard cutout extras is the way to go. 

Entire cast will be mannequins!

[Bloodporne]

6 minutes ago, Remarkableriots said:

Entire cast will be mannequins!

Okay, I shouldn't be leaking this exclusive, VIP insider information but...here's a still from the upcoming Jaws reboot (Summer 2022 ya'll)

 

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, Bloodporne said:

Clearly cardboard cutout extras is the way to go. 

 

It worked for Mark Cerny

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

This has been something I’ve been a bit worried about too. I realized weeks ago that anything that hasn’t already been filmed for tv, won’t be any time soon. This will eventually lead to a lack of media being released. Not just movies being delayed, but seasons of shows, possibly even the remainder of a season for some shows. Not too unlike the writers strike years back. 

[skillzdadirecta]

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

This has been something I’ve been a bit worried about too. I realized weeks ago that anything that hasn’t already been filmed for tv, won’t be any time soon. This will eventually lead to a lack of media being released. Not just movies being delayed, but seasons of shows, possibly even the remainder of a season for some shows. Not too unlike the writers strike years back. 

Oh yeah. There's a ton of shows that will be delayed. There were some shows that didn't even finish shooting the seasons that were airing. 

[SoberChef]

I'd say probably by end of the year, very beginning of next year is when we'll start to see a drought of sorts, what's intriguing is just how long will that drought last then? Between now and then, is there even a chance for Indies to find their niche with a tighter turnaround to feed the market? What if all of this goes to hell and the dreaded 2nd wave butt fucks everything all over again, what will that end up looking like for the industry & world in the next few years time?

 

SO many questions that is quite daunting to even begin to comprehend and we're talking merely just about the entertainment industry!

[skillzdadirecta]

2 hours ago, SoberChef said:

I'd say probably by end of the year, very beginning of next year is when we'll start to see a drought of sorts, what's intriguing is just how long will that drought last then? Between now and then, is there even a chance for Indies to find their niche with a tighter turnaround to feed the market? What if all of this goes to hell and the dreaded 2nd wave butt fucks everything all over again, what will that end up looking like for the industry & world in the next few years time?

 

SO many questions that is quite daunting to even begin to comprehend and we're talking merely just about the entertainment industry!

You're gonna see a drought sooner than that especially with TV. Like I said, there were shows that were currently airing that hadn't finished shooting and I know for a fact that a lot of shows that were gearing up for seasons that would premiere in the summer and fall were still in the writing stages and hadn't even started production yet. The good thing is folks can get caught up on all the shows they wanted to watch but hadn't yet because if it wasn't in the can before March 2020, then it's not getting seen this year and that accounts for a LOT of shows. 

[Keyser_Soze]

As someone who hasn't watched TV in the last five years, not even the final couple of seasons of game of thrones, I won't experience a drought.

[TheLeon]

Suddenly, Unfriended became the most valuable movie franchise, as it’s the only one that can be shot remotely. 

[TwinIon]

This is primarily focused on smaller productions in the UK, but this is a hurdle I hadn't considered before: Production insurance.

 

Right now it seems that none of the insurers will cover COVID related issues, either for already insured productions that have been delayed, or for future productions. I think that makes a certain amount of sense, given that if they did, they'd all be bankrupt by now.

 

Still, it makes sense that the insurance market might have to be among the first to get things figured out before productions can resume on a large scale. Until insurers feel comfortable with their bets on what the risks involved are, it's difficult for others to. It makes you consider just how much risk assessment we've outsourced to insurers, and how much uncertainty there must be if they're still hands off the whole thing.  

[SimpleG]

21 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

not even the final couple of seasons of game of thrones

That show ended abruptly in 2014 with 4 seasons, you missed nothing.

[skillzdadirecta]

On 4/27/2020 at 8:00 PM, Keyser_Soze said:

As someone who hasn't watched TV in the last five years, not even the final couple of seasons of game of thrones, I won't experience a drought.

Too bad because TV has been FAR superior to movies on a whole the last five years or so.