Hollywood Reporter: Within days in mid-March, soundstages in the U.S. went from bustling hubs to abandoned ghost towns as the novel coronavirus forced studios to shut down filming. “There is nothing like being the only person on a movie lot,” says Mark Nicholas, one of few people able to keep working at Manhattan Beach Studios in Southern California in order to assist in the live-streaming of local mayor and sheriff news addresses. “It’s deathly quiet and feels very much like The Walking Dead.”
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I cannot imagine the headache from scheduling that will appear for most sound stages across the US after the pandemic. Many sound stages are booked for months at a time with little breaks in between to accommodate the massive amount of TV shows and films that are being produced. With the coronavirus pandemic, this schedule has been put on hold indefinitely. Some sound stages hope to return on June 1st, but even putting off three months of productions will cause headaches for many. Schedulers will have to content with productions that were in mid filming, and upcoming films that were scheduled for the rest of the year. With many screenwriters homebound during the pandemic, there will also be an influx of new material for films and TV shows that will eventually have to have a place to film as well. Needless to say, sound stages and film/TV companies across the US will certainly make back the money they lost during the pandemic. It is just going to be a scheduling nightmare after.
When we learn about uh… planning productions, I do not think that this is something we account for in terms of planning ahead. There are lots of articles that pop up that make us think “of course that is gonna be an issue” when it comes to anything that has been impacted by the coronavirus. It makes sense that schedules for upcoming Hollywood movies will be impacted even though there are plenty of productions that have not begun yet. I suspect we might see some kind of “logjamming” when our own early productions will need to be constructed in a shorter time frame so that they can be ready in the early fall. Either that or they will overlap with the build process for a show that demands more resources than there is allocated space for. It will be interesting to see how adjustments are made across the board in every industry that is carefully planned.
This sounds like a mess. I can only hope that necessity breeds a little bit of invention, and maybe spawns some new techniques and practices for making projects happen in non-ideal environments. It has the potential to really shut out smaller projects and smaller groups without so much sway, but it could also spur them to figure out how to film without a a studio. The quality might not be quite as high, but it could open up the field and lower barriers to entry, possibly allowing for new talent to break in where it might not have had the resouces to do so before. I don't know much about fim and tv production, so maybe this is unrealistic, but I can hope. The only thing for most of us to do is wait and see. Like so many other things, there seems to be potential that could be unlocked by this crisis, if it's not crushed entirely.
Yet another article commenting on how another industry will be coping with post-pandemic restart. Movie sets and soundstages were obviously shut down amidst the Covid outbreak, along with all non-essential businesses. This obviously wreaked havoc on studios small and large alike, as many will now have a delayed production schedule, but on top of that, countless in-progress works have currently been shut down. This poses a terrible scheduling problem for when the world restarts again, because it becomes a question of what to do. Do the studios honor their schedule and let productions stick to their original schedules? Do the studios push back their entire schedule to accommodate due to the unforeseen pandemic? It will be a very difficult time for the studios to readjust their production schedules, as there are countless factors to take into consideration in the process. The article mentioned that most studios are booked out six to eighteen months in advance, which is a whole lot of production work to have to re-coordinate when the CDC determines it is safe to resume work. Needless to say, the scheduling coordinators at studios and soundstage lots really have their work cut out for them to resume normal operations when allowed.
I think it’s crazy how much the Corona virus is affecting so many different things, not just people. Museums, concerts, flights, etc are all being cancelled due to the outbreak, and the consensus of when everyone will be safe is still undetermined. It’s really scary to think that a virus could cause so much destruction all over the world now. The fact that it's hitting the entertainment industry is also really scary especially when thinking about how long it took the virus to do the amount of damage it has and scare the amount of people it does. Also, the amount of money being poured into these productions and shows all for it to be cancelled is so heartbreaking. The hard work these people put into the shows is all going to waste, and there is no telling if any of it will be salvageable, both monetarily and performance wise- I hope there is some kind of way to get their money back.
The logistics on this are just going to be awful, especially because we still don’t really have an idea on what the timeline of this will really be. Companies are making tentative plans that may or may not actually be possible, because they have to. Obviously shutting down the production of movies and theater was the correct one, but there are consequences. We’re feeling the first part of those now, the consequences of suddenly stopping everything, but this is the first thing I’ve seen talking about the consequences of starting up again. The current system is set up to work with continuous rotation of different productions, and there’s going to be issues as soon as the country tries to start up again with everyone trying to start at once and overloading the technical supplies and studios. And if they build more soundstages and make more lights, and then this first wave passes and if the timeline goes back to normal, now all these companies are going to be sitting on stock they don’t have a need for and potentially not enough money. This is going to be a logistical nightmare that I’m not sure there are any good solutions for.
For large productions, scheduling can already be a challenge and oftentimes they are working around a few different peoples prior commitments. Now everyone's projects will be happening simultaneously. There will likely be more than a few production people and actors whose projects will now overlap, let alone the spaces. I wonder how they will remedy these situations. Who knows maybe this will be an opportunity for newcomers to the industry to get their feet wet when many projects are in motion all at the same time. On another note, safety will likely be a huge component of returning to work. Usually, when 1 person on a team gets sick it's not a big deal, but now there is this societal awareness of a cough or sneeze that may require delays in production to protect everyone’s health. With no one in the world knowing when this is exactly going to end I think it’s very wise to think about schedules in terms of opening day. For instance, x projects gets 3 weeks from opening before transitioning to project z.
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