"Can you hear me?"
"Sorry, you go. No, you go."
"You're muted. Nope. Still muted."
"Is someone washing dishes?"
"I think we lost him."
There's a new world out there. There's a new world order being born because of COVID-19. We are in a global state of emergency, food supply chains have been disrupted, travel bans, quarantines, mandatory masks, outlawed indoor dining; film shoots are seemingly all "three weeks out" and based on our Zoom meetings, I figure everyone in my office owns a cat. Our work life and social life rhetoric resembles a generic, branded cell phone commercial. I have a Teradici in my house and I no longer have to move my body to port to meeting after meeting after meeting.
Most of the confirmed work for studios everywhere is either delayed indefinitely or vanished with productions that were brought to a sudden halt. Crafty Apes was extremely fortunate in that we were in the midst of a facility expansion and had booked a heavy summer...and had received footage for a majority of our large shows before the shutdown happened. We were able to put our work-from-home system to full use and even hire for additional positions in the midst of the pandemic, while many friendly competitors were struggling to survive.
On the surface there was little that Crafty needed to change in order to work remotely. For our artists and support staff, we grabbed our personal items and brought them home as we would usually do every Friday night anyway, along with a Teradici system and a Red Sophos modem/firewall per person...our New York and Atlanta offices share the same server with autosyncs that were already in place to mirror shared work with Los Angeles, and from New York, so none of our data lives on the artists' boxes anyway. Thus, this was merely transferring one's current setup to the home environment (in low traffic areas, away from nosy roommates and/or any giant windows).
Behind the scenes, however, our IT department was at the heart of the company; working literally 24/7 in that first week to create a seamless and working transition to preserve the necessary security protections our clients require. They have been the front-line heroes of our success, keeping the tech blood pumping to ensure every staff member could still work.
As our workstations moved into our own bedrooms and lofts, our production team kicked into overdrive to recalibrate and swiftly institute a structured communication workflow to address the human challenges of WFH - AKA lots of meetings. At Crafty we weren't strangers to working remotely. Sessions with clients rarely ever took place in-person and we dip heavily into cross collaboration with all of our facilities. But most had never worked 100 percent remotely. Screen shares and synced playback became the backbone of our visual communication with each other so as to ensure everyone is looking and pointing at the same thing. No matter where in the world everyone is, a picture still holds a thousand words.
But if supervising a team of a dozen or more artists could be described as a shepherd guiding his flock, being remote certainly has made it much more challenging to notice when one of your herd has wandered in the wrong direction. To supplement our constant check-ins we asked that our team make it a practice to overcommunicate to ensure that attention was given to every individual and every aspect of our show.
I do think that the greatest loss with WFH is the free flow of creative problem solving and camaraderie that comes from mingling in an office together. Spur-of-the-moment-over-the-shoulder-trainings, water cooler talk, lunch together, dailies, rounds...were something that would lead to a serendipitous sharing of information.
You can't just have a communal drink anymore after work to blow off some steam with your fellow soldiers. Now everyone has to take turns talking, even during our digital happy hours. Will we become more mindful people by the end of this? What etiquette will be engrained in us as we sit in our bedroom battlestations?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that the world will always be in want of distraction. And now the world has a lot less it can do away from their screens. VFX will undoubtedly become an even more instrumental tool in the filmmaking process, as it will be the key to shooting safely while maintaining social distancing and lean crews. There is going to be so much more visual effects work to do than ever before as the techniques and technology that we use every day can help production from day one; be it in assisting with previs to help block out shots, scan environments and virtually location scout, to generating scenes that would be otherwise impossible to recreate in the same manner that we used to before the pandemic reinvented VFX's new normal.
Our industry's future is about to resurge with more fully-animated content, split screens and performance morphs between talent, LED screen projection with high-detail backgrounds, less production travel, more stage work and CG set extensions and matte paintings, digital makeup and prosthetics, and a whole lot of crowd duplication. With any luck, we can help keep telling stories while also providing a safe and creative industry for all of us.
Leslie Chung is a VFX supervisor at Crafty Apes (www.craftyapes.com), a visual effects studio with five locations across North America (Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Baton Rouge and Vancouver).