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?
The pandemic forced our 12-year-old business to innovate. After over a decade of perfecting local crew deployments, at scale, around the world, we combined several niche practices we had developed for clients and combined them to create and productize a service called “Drop Kits™,” which became prolific during the height of the pandemic.
As the need for quality, contactless deployments subsided, we reverted to our old business model, but enhanced it with live connectivity and the virtual set experience. That new service is called Crew+™ (crew plus), and every time we deploy one of our thousands of crews around the world, all stakeholders can view the camera feed in real time, through all lenses. In addition, Crew Cam™ and Witness Cameras provide an unparalleled virtual set experience.
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?
Hayden5 has made diversity a priority in recruiting efforts for both full-time staff and freelancers for many years. While we would love to snap our fingers and have an endless pool of qualified, diverse talent to choose from, the truth is that the pool of talent should be larger, and there are systemic issues that have to be tackled. Mandatory quotas and DEI reports are a reflection of the present, which is important, but if we do not also focus on the future, we will not solve the problem. That’s why we have chosen to focus on education, mentorship, and support for young people.
Under our philanthropic arm, Hayden5 RISE, we finance a student’s journey through a CUNY film school each year, while providing mentorship and funding for their senior thesis film. Hayden5 RISE also launched the Gear Grant, in partnership with Video Consortium, to purchase equipment packages for emerging, underrepresented professionals in our industry. Hayden5 RISE has plans to expand both programs.
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.
In addition to virtual sets becoming more commonplace, the client edit will forever have a virtual option, and it will soon be better than in-person sessions.
The pandemic forced Hayden5 to move a large post-production staff from our offices into a virtual workspace. The result became a new product, Cloud Cuts™, which combines software and service for real-time, low latency client edits. It allowed Hayden5 to open up our freelance, postproduction talent pool to anyone in the world, and solve media delivery issues with our product, Lightning Delivery™, instead of shipping around hard drives.
In a lot of ways, the pandemic forced a speedy modernization of practices that helped our industry leap forward into a greener, more diverse, and more efficient future.
