FILMMAKERS GLOBAL NETWORK
Community Spotlight
Blake Barnett
Project Manager
CURRENT PROJECTS:
We mostly produce commercial and corporate video type projects. As you can imagine work is pretty slow at the moment and not business as usual. Therefore, we have been focusing more on live streaming and social media solutions for our clients. As we speak, we have crews live streaming a few high school graduation ceremonies. This is one of the wins for what can be accomplished via live streaming, and we look forward to doing more of these in the future. We also had a Zoom meeting yesterday for a virtual airshow. The sky is literally the limit to what you can do!
MEMORABLE PROJECT:
On one of our first larger scale commercial projects we shot a scene for Xgliders where we closed down a street in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun to have our talent on these skateboard-like devices, plus we all learned how to use them. Every now and then, you’ll still see someone in our office cruising by on them.
CHALLENGE & SOLUTION:
Our biggest challenge has always been with crew. It’s not an easy task to have the right team on set in multiple States. We struggled with this for years in trying to maintain a spreadsheet of all our stellar crew resources. A few years ago, we organized and digitized our spreadsheet and made it open to the public (shoots.video) to use as a resource as well.
3 PRODUCTION TIPS:
# 1. Contingencies. Always have a backup plan because even the best plans don’t always work out like you think they will.
# 2. Proactivity. Anticipate problems and solutions to resolve them before they happen. This also goes for learning your craft. You’re never done and always working on improving.
# 3. Punctuality. This is both with call times and deliverables. When the call time is 8am, and you arrive at 8am you are late. You should always arrive early. Then for deliverables, it’s always good to under promise and over deliver. Give yourself a cushion for life’s unknowns.# 4. Ego. We all have one and can be the biggest threat of them all since we’re very passionate about our work. Be humble my friends!
https://networking.studentfilmmakers.com/profile/videoproduction
