What’s the impact of the pandemic on you, your company, your approach to doing business in the future? What practices emerged that you will continue even as restrictions are loosening?
We have tried for years to find the most streamlined approach but it was not always easy to get the full wider team on board, including the client.
The pandemic forced everyone’s hand to be as streamlined as possible since there was no other choice. The necessity to move to 100% remote viewing has hopefully shown the industry that we can be more efficient with less bodies on set monitoring the action. It allows us to place more energy and resources to the crew and the action taking place on screen than the action at video village. It allowed for more technology integration and deeper research into ways to improve the remote monitoring options.
On the post side, we invested in remote team access to our server allowing everyone full remote access to shared media and projects — which now opens up our ability to work with some of our favorite collaborators when they are not in the same geographic location in a truly seamless and integrated way.
Being back in the office, we definitely have benefited from the expediency of feedback and workflow but it gave us confidence that the hybrid model can work really well moving forward.
How has the call for equity, racial and social justice affected, honed or influenced your sense of responsibility as a company in terms of the content you create and/or your commitment to opening up opportunities for filmmaking talent from underrepresented backgrounds?
We are a company founded and run by people from underrepresented groups, so this has always been top of mind. The call simply strengthened our commitment and made us not fall asleep at the wheel when it comes to building our team as we grow. As a WOSB and NGLCC certified company, it is incredibly important that the makeup of the company remains diverse as well. We truly believe that when you have more diverse voices in the process, from start to finish, the work is stronger. We have listened to our staff and tried to be responsive and look outside traditional avenues for seeking talent and fostering the right people when the opportunity arises.
As for the content we create, we love to focus on the more unexpected stories and oftentimes, those tend to exist when you highlight the groups of people that have not been the point of focus for society at large. And doing so not because it is on trend but because the story is better.
It is even more crucial that those stories are supported by people from more diverse backgrounds themselves. It is not always feasible, of course, but something we strive to ensure whenever possible.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for the second half of 2021 and beyond.
I do not want to jinx anything but the start of 2021 has been our busiest and best two quarters to date in our 10 years in business. We hope to continue on this growth trajectory while being able to be a little more deliberate in the work we take on. The first part of the year, I felt we had our heads down and were simply trying to get everything completed and not under-deliver. We are finally coming up for a little air. We have made several hires in the last couple of months to support this and hope we can leverage that to make all our work stronger and our offerings to our clients that much more robust.
I feel clients are anxious to make things and be out in the world. It is clear Covid may be with us for a while longer but we are all adapting and moving forward. It truly is pretty incredible to see human resilience.
What are your goals, creatively speaking and/or from a business standpoint, for your company, division, studio or network in 2021?
A year ago, we were in a pretty dark place, trying to ensure the company survived and we didn’t lose any team members. So, I do feel so grateful to be answering this question a year later.
In hindsight, it was a really great pivot point for us. Almost like a little reckoning. We took stock of the work we loved making and what we had to offer. 2021 is about putting that vision into place in a very deliberate manner. So far, I am feeling really good about our progress.
I was able to make Amani King a partner/ECD in the company and we’re actively working to strengthen our creative team and build our director roster with intention. With the addition of our new CD, Michael Grant, we are positioning ourselves to go after the work we want with confidence, as well as better support those clients who already have an existing creative team. We also want to produce our multiple passion projects that focus on subjects with an overall beneficial social impact, something we all feel strongly about as a team.
It is a great lesson to trust that sometimes the most interesting and positive change can come out of the most difficult and trying times.
