What was the biggest challenge posed to you by a recent project? Or share insights to a recent project you deem notable. Briefly describe the project, why it was particularly noteworthy or what valuable lesson(s) you learned from it.
After remotely filming four seasons of contestant home follow packages for The Voice, NBC approached Hometeam with a seemingly impossible task – Their new show “American Song Contest” would feature a musical act from every U.S. state and territory and they wanted to film background packages of all contestants in their home states, all remotely, all during the pandemic travel restrictions. By tapping Hometeam’s hand-picked filmmakers in each state and territory, we were able to pull off 56 shoots – beautifully and consistently shot in broadcast quality – in 8 weeks. Some days shooting in multiple states simultaneously. No one ever set foot on a plane. View the work here: https://wearehometeam.com/project/nbc-american-song-contest
Are you involved in virtual production or experimenting with AI, AR or other emerging disciplines or new technologies? Have you engaged in any real-world projects on these fronts? If so, relative to experimental and/or actual projects, briefly tell us about the work & what you’ve taken away from the experience.
Hometeam is always working at the leading edge of what’s possible in remote production on a global scale. We’re best-in-class at working with local crews to capture content where it lives and streaming shoots to client via virtual video village. We’ve done this for clients as varied as Google, Apple, LG, Ford, L’Oreal, Walmart, NBC, HBO, and many more. We’ve filmed in every state, U.S. territory and on every continent in the past two years. In the past year, we’ve also extended our capabilities through postproduction to enable crews to quickly upload footage from wherever they shoot – no more hard drives in the mail! And client and post creatives can work remotely and collaborate in the cloud. One great example – for the America Is All In Coalition and Deutsch NY – found us filming 12 subjects (including high-powered execs and A-List celebrities) across nine cities all completely remote. View the work here: https://wearehometeam.com/project/america-is-all-in
Does your company have plans for any major diversification and/or expansion/investment in technology and talent this year and if so, what? How will this investment or diversification add value to what you can offer to clients? If instead you have already realized any actual expansion, made such an investment and/or diversified significantly recently, share those developments with us along with what they mean to your staff and clients.
Hometeam is coming off three consecutive years of growth and a recent Fast Company Most Innovative Company honor and we’re expecting that growth to continue even in an economic climate of uncertainty. Our model of remote production eliminates travel costs, extended timelines, and other production inefficiencies and allows clients to get more production value out of their budgets. So we’re finding a lot of budget constrained clients are reaching out to Hometeam to help them find strategic ways to do more with less while continuing to improve the quality and scale of their storytelling. We’ve done this by building a remotely distributed network of filmmakers and stitching it all together with tech-enabled streamlined processes. We call it “right sized production” and our goal is to re-imagine production and build a company for today’s content needs.
Gender pay disparity, sexual misconduct and the need for diversity & inclusion are issues that have started to be dealt with meaningfully. While the industry has made strides to address these issues, there’s still a long way to go. What policies do you have in place or plan to implement or step up in order to make progress on any or all of these fronts?
Hometeam is proud of the filmmaker network we’ve built beyond the typical coastal production hubs. We hire hundreds of filmmakers coast-to-coast across all genders and ethnicities. We find stories told by local filmmakers, who lean into their know-how of locations, local customs and languages, are often richer and more authentic. In a recent example, to film “Women of Worth” a campaign about Women’s Empowerment for L’Oreal and HBO Max, we assembled eight female-led, female-majority crews in eight different cities to extend the campaign’s spirit to the team behind the lens. View the work here: https://wearehometeam.com/project/loreal-paris
Tell us about significant creative, filmmaking or tech talent you’ve recently brought into your company–including from those groups underrepresented in the industry–and what drew you to him, her and/or them. If this was talent new to the industry, how did you go about “discovering” him, her and/or them?
One of our most recent hires was Dan Tundis who we brought on as our EP, director of postproduction. We tasked Dan with helping us research and develop a leading-edge solution for post-production in the cloud. With crews located across the U.S. and 150 countries, oftentimes the biggest bottleneck becomes shipping drives from a shoot in the field to the editing team. Dan was able to find and build solutions that now enable our production crews to upload their footage within hours to post-production staff located remotely around the world. Post teams–AEs, editors, VFX, finishing–can all collaborate on the same timeline from the comfort of their own home studios. We’re able to work with the best editorial talent regardless of location and turn around edits and deliver versions much faster than before. https://wearehometeam.com/our-team
