Oh, Coronavirus. You invisible bastard.
The pandemic has affected everyone in some way and the production industry, along with other creative industries, was one of the worst hit. Most of the projects I typically work on are made by groups of people in small interior spaces — in other words, the ideal scenario for the virus to spread. It was inevitable that filming jobs would get cancelled.
For me, everything was fine and dandy up until around mid-March. I was working with my regular clients either remotely or in their offices half-joking about the impending pandemic. “So and so has a cough! He must have the virus!” Little did we know, he probably did.
Jobs booked in for April and beyond seemed less and less likely. Then the expected emails came in: “We need to postpone the edit. The shoot is up in the air now.” With that, my calendar became empty and no sign of paid work for the foreseeable future.
“It’ll be fine,” I thought, “the government are going to deliver an unprecedented support package to help us self-employed out, like they have done with the furlough scheme for full-time employees.” I waited on tenterhooks for Rishi Sunak’s announcement. Then one day, he approaches the stand. Thirty minutes later, I’m left unsure as to what was actually announced and how it applies to me.
It wasn’t all bad news though. I started to get the odd job pop into my inbox from mid-April and I am so grateful for those clients still finding a way to outsource their work, including a fairly regular flow of video tours to edit for my brother’s estate agency. Of course, the work I was able to complete over lockdown was not my usual filmed editorial work, but any work that helped pay the bills was more than welcome.
I was also able to use the downtime to really sink my teeth into editing and colour grading the short film I have been working on, A Change in Time. If it wasn’t for lockdown, the whole post-production process on getting this film complete would have been much slower, as myself and the rest of the people involved have all been doing so for free in our spare time.
As I write this in mid-July, things are still to return to normal, though a lot of my clients and colleagues are slowly starting to get back to it as their clients return to work. It has been uplifting to see social media posts of crews back on set and clients returning to offices, so I do have reassurance that the workflow will be picking up again soon.