Time Machine
Ah… COVID, COVID, COVID
There’s not much else that’s occupied the mind in 2020 more so than a worldwide pandemic, especially for entertainment workers. For artists, performers and support crew in live and recorded media, nothing has quite so broadly affected workflow as COVID-19, nor is it likely we’ll see such an event again with such far reaching and all encompassing impact.
But all is not lost… or actually, really all that different. COVID, was just a time machine.
Welcome to the future.
Remember playing with a Newton’s Cradle. Pull a suspended ball bearing or two back and let fly. Then sit back and enjoy the show physics plays out. One of two things is going to happen: either 1) friction, gravity, entropy… all those good physics concepts we ignored in high school come into play over time and the pendulums end up back in the middle, at rest.
Or 2); you’re gonna stick your hand in and stop all motion, just getting to that eventual point of rest a lot quicker.
COVID was just the universe, sticking its finger in.
Streamlining production, digital capture and distribution, including streaming and first-run in-home premieres were all pointing media arts towards an eventual end. A balance point where efficiency reigns king.
That’s just good business. The industry is on the path from exclusively studio-owned theatrical distribution to downloading movies straight to your brain, Matrix-style, and who knows where after that. No matter where productions sit on that path, the goal has always been to generate quality content that mass markets want to consume, produced and delivered as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
COVID only took us down the road we were going a little bit faster.
Production has been headed that way since the DSLR revolution. Fifteen years ago, there were essentially four tiers of production. The gold standard of Hollywood, film students and indies shooting on Super 16, broadcast TV and commercial work, and the wannabe’s, skate-video guys and horror-hounds all shooting on MIniDV.
Each of these were still relatively small groups. The pioneers of MiniDV were well known in their field, not to the level of renown, but with the same degree of recognition as the Spielbergs and Scorceses. Then digital video really became viable for everyone. Cameras became affordable. Editing digitally at home became possible, YouTube and Vimeo emerged to host the seemingly endless fountain of content. Suddenly creating and self-distributing a work became a real possibility.
Yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, rise of streaming, 4K, overusing the word “cinematic,” platform wars, death of theaters, COVID… and here we’re all caught up.
Budgets are getting smaller. Direct clients and production companies are looking for small-footprint approaches. Hollywood is classifying who is “essential” or “Tier 1” on set. For years, owner-operators have dominated middle-markets, where clients with Warner Brothers budgets or Madison Avenue ad agency clients just don’t exist. Cameras are more sensitive. Lights are cheaper and brighter. Knowledge is more accessible. The pendulum has been swinging away from big crew, big equipment needed kinds of production for a while.
As for the other side of the pendulum, the one-man-band approach has had its day in the sun. Clients are seeing that adding a few additional rolls, an audio recordist or a lighting technician or two, takes so much of the burden off of just one set of shoulders. In the same timeframe, they’re getting a product exponentially exceeding the expectations they had of that same single individual based on past projects, without exponentially increasing costs. That’s efficiency.
Likewise Hollywood is being forced to re-evaluate it’s modalities. It is certainly nice, but not necessary to have assistants to directors, assistants to actors, personal assistants to producers, PA’s, craft services and catering services on set to get a cup of coffee or a protein bar… But you can live without them when COVID says they go or you don’t get to shoot at all.
Certainly the needs of a production are going to vary based on that specific production. And they always will. But the baseline, the expectation of who needs to be around to accomplish the task at hand, is under a re-evaluation in the time of COVID, that isn’t going to necessarily swing back once a vaccine is readily available. This is a good thing. This is a temporary change forcing an accelerated adaptation.
Small, sensitive digital cameras, wielded by highly creative and motivated individuals changed the landscape. But they’re capped in what they can do alone. Huge, tentpole productions have elevated storytelling to new technological heights and made virtually everything possible. But both of these approaches are inefficient extremes. The pendulum has to swing back to the middle.
For most productions that means, fewer people than you’d like, all wearing a few more hats than they’d like, and working a little harder than they might’ve in years past… But not so many hats that they all suffer burnout en masse, and not so many people that the client scraps the shoot altogether.
And that’s a balance I can live with… A balance I’ve been striking for awhile, and will detail… next time...