Roughly a 3 minute read by Lauren.
How’s lockdown 3.0 going for you? Challenging? Tedious? Worrying? Yes, I’ve felt all of this too.
It has been a saviour that the Government allowed production to still go ahead in lockdown and we’ve worked on some brilliant photo and film shoots in January including Dr Oetker, Sky One, Beaverbrooks and the fashion brand, Beaumont Organics. We’ve also experienced the other side of the coin and have had many shoots put on hold or even cancelled because clients have not wanted to shoot in lockdown.
The UK Locations team has been keeping busy by focussing on strategic planning, rolling out more 360 virtual recces across our location library, improving systems and processes and up-skilling by using resources like ScreenSkills and the Screen Industries Growth Programme.
I 100% believe that once children start going back to school in March (hopefully) and businesses have their full teams back, the industry will get extremely busy again, as it did when we came out of lockdown in August 2020.
With the new Covid-19 variant, safety on shoots is still top of our minds and I’ve found the Advertising Producers Association’s Testing Guidelines really helpful to include in our Shooting on Location Guidelines that we give to clients.
I loved reading the British Film Commissions most recent report showing that international film and high-end TV production spend in the UK has topped £2.34bn in 2020 despite the initial impact of COVID-19. It has been an extremely difficult time for freelancers in our industry and this report shows there is hope and positivity on the horizon.
Finally, Manchester City Council and HOME recently announced a major fund for freelancers working in the Arts and Culture sector. More information on this can be found here.