"I’ve worked on a few projects throughout quarantine. I have a pretty strong client base in the Healthcare Market so as things with Covid-19 started to unfold they reached out to me wanting to put out CEO messages, thank you messages to the community, safety videos, etc. There has been a lot of shooting in hospitals for me recently but luckily for me I’m an owner operator so I usually work with a small crew to begin with so that was to our advantage. Other precautions we took were things such as keeping our gear and cases only on our carts, not letting anyone else touch the gear except me and my crew, wearing face masks all the time and and other PPE when necessary. We put extra emphasis on shot lists and storyboarding to minimize our time on set. Film Florida also put out a Covid safe production guide that we tried to follow very closely.
This particular shoot that I posted about was our first project that we worked on that was not a Covid related message. It was a TV commercial for a new orthopedic practice that just opened. I brought in a crew that was larger than what we had been working on but still small in comparison to most commercial work. We all took on extra responsibilities to keep our numbers down.
This was a two day shoot, Days 1 was in the Ortho office shooting Doctor/patient interaction stuff and then Day 2 was lifestyle stuff like you saw in my post. During preproduction I spent a lot of time on the phone with the Doctors office assuring them that we would be operating in manner that would minimize risk to their staff, patients and my crew. I made sure to ask if there were any extra precautions that they would like us to take to stay within their office policy. As a crew we asked everyone to bring in their own snacks and refillable water bottles as we were not going to have that stuff available during the shoot, and for lunch wI ordered pre-packaged box lunches to keep contact with each other to a minimum. For the lifestyle day I made sure communicate with the state park administration so that we followed their guidelines as well.
I rented the Teradek for this shoot for several reasons. One, it’s a critical piece and great with a larger production like this where the client and my director reviewing the shots to make sure we are on track with the script and story board. The added side benefit is that we don’t have a bunch of cables running all over set getting contaminated by the ground and everybody touching them so they don't trip. I’m pretty bummed I have to send it back." - Michael L.