The Future of TV Briefing this week looks at how far digital video and commercial productions have come from the days of fully remote shoots.

Fifteen months after in-person shoots took a hiatus in the face of the coronavirus crisis, digital video and commercial productions still don’t look entirely normal, but they’re getting pretty close.

“We have a couple upcoming shoots that are going to be in-person, and the shoots themselves are going to feel relatively normal,” said Jack Foster, art director and film director at creative studio Stink Studios.

To be clear, “relatively” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A producer time-traveling from 2019 would still not see today’s commercial and digital video shoots as normal. Mask mandates, testing requirements and distancing measures remain in place, and they will likely continue to be a part of production at least through the end of 2021, said Dani Hiravy, head of production at creative agency Mustache. Compared to the projects being shot entirely remotely in spring of 2020, though, productions are approaching normalcy.

“If it’s on a scale of 1 to 10 normal or not, we’re at like an 8,” said Gabriella Mangino, executive producer at food publisher Food52.

The key hits:

• Digital video and commercial productions have returned to shooting inside and have been expanding their crew sizes.
• Between the typically busy summer season and the addition of remote capabilities, production loads are increasing.
• While companies are relaxing some COVID-related safety measures, they plan to maintain many protocols until the pandemic is officially over.

Digital video and commercial productions began their return to normal last summer. When companies initially resumed in-person shoots, they typically limited themselves to shooting outside and with less than a dozen — at times, less than a handful — people working on location. Since then, as coronavirus case numbers have dropped and vaccination rates have risen, they have eased toward shooting inside and expanding their crew sizes. 

“We are doing maybe not large-scale [productions], but we’ve got crew sizes exceeding 40 [people] at times,” said Hiravy, noting that the agency continues to limit sets to only necessary cast and crew members. The average commercial project has 40 to 60 people working on set, she said.

The production return’s latest phase is coming at an opportune time. Summer is typically a busy season for commercial shoots, and companies are already seeing brand activity pick up and even exceed pre-pandemic levels. Stink Studios is slated to have four to five projects going into production over the next few months, which is roughly double the number it had in production during the summer of 2019, Foster said.

For Food52, last year’s shift to remote production has helped with the resumption of in-person shoots. The publisher developed and refined processes for being able to shoot in the homes of its shows’ stars, like Sohla El-Waylly, Erin McDowell and Rick Martinez. So rather than having its stars return to shooting in its studio, which began reopening last summer, Food52 has continued to shoot in their homes with a limited number of crew members, such as a director and a couple people to manage lighting, IT and sound. That has enabled Food52 to produce more editorial videos — “Before with Sohla, we would only do one a day. Now we’re up to three videos in a day with her,” Mangino said — and has freed up Food52’s studio for branded video productions.

“Our brands partnership work has been scaling up, so it means we can do three shoots for brand partnerships every week. Previously it was like one day a week,” said Mangino.

However, even as production ramps up, companies are taking care to not race toward risk. Many of the health and safety protocols put in place last year, particularly mask-wearing and testing requirements, continue to be a part of production, but that has enabled companies to relax some measures as government- and/or industry-mandated restrictions lift. 

“You don’t want to lighten up too much too soon, but the things we’re lightening up on are putting multiple people in vehicles,” said Adam Zimmer, executive producer for West Coast at production company Valiant Pictures.

Productions typically rent out 15-person passenger vans to transport cast and crew members to and from locations. Valiant Pictures had been limiting its vans to only carry two or three people but has started to allow a few more people in each van, said Zimmer. The company had also been limited its lunch tables to seating two people at a time to each six-foot table and has similarly expanded that to a few more people per table. As a result, Valiant Pictures does not need to rent out as many passenger vans and tables for shoots, which has lowered its production costs by 5% to 10% on average, he said.

Food publisher Tastemade had been requiring cast and crew members to wear contact-tracing dongles that monitored whether two people were within six feet of one another for more than 15 minutes at a time, according to the company’s head of production Kevin Furuta. But after Los Angeles County updated its guidance in March 2021 following a drop in hospitalizations, Tastemade relaxed the requirement. That has enabled the company to add extra crew members to productions.

“To be able to get extra crew members in there, that can help out a production. You’re able to do more in the day,” Furuta said.

Next week, Tastemade will take another step in its return to production. The company will implement a system to track cast and crew members’ vaccination records — in compliance with federal health privacy law — in order to have fully vaccinated productions for some projects (the company will make accommodations for people who do not get vaccinated for health or religious reasons). But, even for fully vaccinated productions, protocols like mask mandates and cleaning procedures will remain in place, said Furuta, who noted that Tastemade has had no instances of COVID being spread on one of its productions.

However, even as restrictions lift and productions approach normalcy, “we are not going to ease protocols for the sake of easing protocols,” Furuta said. The safety-first sentiment was shared by everyone that Digiday interviewed for this article. As Hiravy noted, “COVID is not over.”

This article has been updated to reflect that Valiant Pictures had been seating two people at a time to each six-foot table. A previous version said the company had been seating two to six people per table.

Read the original article here.