Film / TV / Media Crew - Technical, employment opportunities and ranting

Bump: still looking for a sound recordist on Monday for 2 hours for an interview in clerkenwell. If anyone is one/is available or if anyone knows one that might be interested feel free to share details etc.

EDIT: Sorted. Cheers

WinLoud is free, it's basically a wrapper for a 2-pass run of the -loudnorm filter in ffmpeg.

http://www.muxson.com/winloud

http://k.ylo.ph/2016/04/04/loudnorm.html

Also I think the SWS extension package for Reaper will do loudness analysis / targeting. It's free.

Ace. Sounds great, will investigate, thanks!

How's everyone finding it?

We've had 8 shoots cancelled since mid Feb plus 20-30 days of post gone. Got a few very meagre editing jobs to see us through but no idea how long they'll last. Trying to push repurposing of existing content and animation. Was pushing live streaming but not having much luck. No one wants any face to face and those that do have killed their budgets.

Good times.

For the moment I'm ok, I'm in the process of wrapping up edits for a global campaign so I know I've got at least a month's worth of work. After that it's a complete mystery, there's edits I'm penciled for which have already been shot but no one knows if brands are just going to pull their media spend and therefore put everything on hold.

Good times indeed, first baby's due in 4 weeks I look forward to telling her about the shitstorm she was born in to.

Working from home for the foreseeable, have laptop to do editing on. But nurseries are closing on Friday so have a two year old to entertain. My missus is also working from home and actually needs to concentrate on what she’s doing so the majority of child care will probably fall to me, which is okay as long as I don’t really have work on, but if a project comes up which needs my attention we’re fucked.
We’re going to have to figure out a routine to give each other time to actually do work.

Know freelancers whose shoot work has just died. Nothing booked in and nothing in the future all they’ve got is chasing invoices...
Hard times.

My living room is now an avid suite. Couriers have been delivering drives and I’m sharing cuts via a media shuttle. A fairly seamless transition and no down days so far. I feel very fortunate though that I was on a job at the right time and with a good production company who were proactive and fast.

Not sure what I’ll do after May though.

Did avid ever roll out the system where you could cut with proxie online files then re link with master media meaning if you had avid and a Internet conection you could edit.
been a while since I worked in post but rember experiments happening.
hope all freelancers are managing to cope.

On Monday I started working for a company that films live TV, some news but mostly sport and large music events, all of which have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. Going to be a very quiet few months and a very weird introduction to the industry!

How is it going CB? Did any work come in...

I’m staff, just been furloughed till May 31. Working for a sports media company means no sport, no work.

Still nothing substantial here which is taking its toll in various ways. Can't even give production away at the moment. Literally. Volunteering with various food producers to go out and shoot stuff to keep me from going mad and I get 'yeah, sounds great' followed by silence followed by a big fucking agency sending a huge crew to do it. Still doing a few small edits and some remote live stream management. Have also been working on converting office into a studio for tabletop stuff but no actual shoots booked for studio or location (despite doing more outreach than I've ever done in my life).

Bruxism setting in. 😬

Sorry to hear that mate, I don't know anyone that's doing shoots locally at the moment. I've been crazy lucky with work, I thought it it was all going to dry up when I finished off my last contract but I picked up another ad to cut that was shot in Denmark, seems they've been pretty unaffected by the pandemic and it's almost business as usual over there.

Hope you can ride it out? I dread to think about what'll be left when this is all over.

That doesn't sound great!
I'm not sure which area you work in but maybe the production insurance announcement from this week will help?
My place has been really struggling but now that the production companies can get insurance (it's now underwritten by the government), it seems they're all getting things back up & running.

What’s actually been going on in the industry? Apart from soaps starting to run out of new episodes and obvs no new live* audience content like talent shows, TV channels seem to have been able to continue to put out quite a lot of new content. How have they done that? Do they have a big catalogue of unused/unedited material sat on the shelf and there’s just been work going on to compile it and put it on screen?

Yep, this is what I've been hearing from a few corners, so crossing fingers even if it doesn't affect us directly (commercials / branded/ corporate) hopefully it'll encourage wider movement. If nothing else maybe I'll go back to jobbing as an AD if bigger productions are back! I passed that APA covid supervisor thing a while ago too!

My jaw is genuinely exhausted with the constant clenching. No euph.

I'm seeing stuff advertised and calls for pitches etc so hoping our time will come. The closest I've had is a film for a care home group which they canceled at the last minute (tbf, much to my wife's relief).

My jaw is genuinely exhausted with the constant clenching.

I’ve got terrible bruxism, have you tried cbd oil?

From my area at least; When lockdown came in filming stopped but there were a lot of shows that had either just finished filming or were pretty close so they were finished in edit.
Depending on the channel/show there can also be quite a long wait between all the filming and editing being finished, then it being broadcast - we have titles that are around a year behind so there is a few amount of flex.

Plus there are a load of shows being repeated.

Outside of drama there are quite a few that can be filmed during lockdown because of the nature of what's being shown, then there are others that you can film from certain angles to make people look closer than they are (I only know of a handful of those though).

Will be doing my first Live Studio show on the 6th (Europa League), so maybe there is a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel...

Just been unfurloughed by work, starting back on the 17th. Hoping there’s work to do, seen some of the freelancers i work with post up how they’re getting back slowly to work, so stuff is getting slowly back on track..

I make history/arts stuff mainly so have been hugely lucky getting a gig working for a video on demand service commissioning their own stuff. Have been working from home but have been pretty back to back with editing archive driven shows and doing zoom interviews with experts.

However, as things start to free up looks like more outdoor and face to face filming will start up again. But with considerably more hoops to jump through setting up shoots than ever before.

Has anyone ever moved across from documentary production (editorial and dev side) into feature film / high end TV drama? Fancy getting out on my feet more now things are kick starting again. It's like another world though, I have no idea where you would start (of if you even should).

Kind of. Moved from current affairs and docs to features and commercials about 10 years ago. It’s not a big leap in technical production terms from there to high end episodic. But it’s very much a relationship game. I see and often have to book a lot of departments that are very insular in who they work with. But in my experience it’s a ‘once you’re in’, situation as long as you can maintain the interpersonal side of things. Is there a role/department you work in / particularly want to work in?