Ever since our species was forced to stay at home, we have been using up video calls a lot more. Companies like Zoom have become as mainstream as Google all of a sudden (for both good and terrible reasons, involving privacy breach and shady user policies).
And we continue to break the so-called limits of how we use video calls.
One particularly heartbreaking instance is , considering the devastating fact that people who have died due to coronavirus are being cremated without their loved ones near them so that they do not risk infection. So, the cremations are happening ‘remotely’, as the hapless families ‘watch’ the proceedings on video!
Another instance is how creatively video calls are being used to collaborate. Quite a few adverting agencies have already created actual ad films for clients using video calls for both collaborations between creative people and for the actual shoot.
A stellar example includes the ‘Family’ film by Prasoon Pandey, probably the first commercial film that has a seamless, coherent script and narrative despite the actors not being in the same place. .
Also, the behind-the-scenes film of how this was put together. The best part of this video is seeing Prasoon acting out each actor’s part, to give them an idea of what he wants them to do, and how.
But Prasoon depended on non-professionals to help him with on-location shoots. The backgrounds were not managed professionally, and he smartly planned the video in Black & White to even out colour and backdrop continuity inconsistencies.
However, can professionals collaborate together to produce something TV-ready or magazine-ready, even as all the participants are sitting in their respective homes?
Yes! Here are 2 great examples.
The first is from Ogilvy UK, for their client VOXI, Vodafone’s youth mobile brand in the UK. Their latest film, called “I am endless (even in isolation)” was created Adam Ronan, a copywriter and Adam Claridge, a creative director, at Ogilvy. The film was directed by Jocelyn Anquetil, from The Mill, a VFX and Creative Content studio in London.
Jocelyn worked on the casting – and this is selecting the right actor (who is also in his home, all through). She also worked on the set design – and this means she worked with the actor to help him create backdrops, props and sets that she wanted, as per the script conceived by Ogilvy’s Adam(s)!
These are professionals, and they are helping the actor do things as per their needs (as per the script) in his home! The result is this film, that went live on TV (during the first Britain’s Got Talent of 2020).
The actual shoot was done using the 4K front and rear cameras on the Samsung Galaxy S20 phone (as used by the actor, with instructions from the remotely working professionals), as well as its internal microphone, to capture good quality audio. The collaboration and discussions were done via Zoom.
The 2nd example is even more interesting! It’s a fashion photoshoot that made it to the latest print issue of Vogue Italy!
Interestingly, Vogue Italy’s April 2020 cover is a blank white design! Reason?
“White is, first and foremost, respect. White is rebirth, light after the darkness, the sum of all the colors. White is the uniforms of those who have saved lives while risking their own. It’s time and space for thinking. And for staying silent too. White is for people who are filling this time and space with ideas, thoughts, stories, verses, music and kindness to others. It’s a reminder that after the crisis in 1929, clothes turned white, a color chosen to express purity in the present and hope for the future. And above all, white is not surrender; it’s a blank page to be filled, the frontispiece of a new story about to begin.”
Source:
—Vogue Italia editor-in-chief, Emanuele Farneti
The magazine’s pages 180 and 181 have something interesting going on in terms of remote collaboration!
They feature international supermodel Bella Hadid posing as she usually does in such fashion magazines. But how it was put together is where it gets interesting! The ‘photoshoot’ was done on Apple FaceTime! The shoot involved professionals too! Brianna Capozzi was the professional photographer, while Lauren Perez handled the lighting and Haley Wollens managed the styling. This literally meant all these professionals instructed a supermodel to do things as per their requirement and made the actual photoshoot via FaceTime!
There’s a fear that professionals would face declining importance during or in the aftermath of this pandemic-induced lockdown and social distancing. That need not be true after all. Professionals bring a certain skill that others do not have. Not everyone is equipped with all kinds of specialized talent. Even if it means one person (in the above examples, the lead actor in the VOXI film and supermodel Bella Hadid) has to do disproportionately more work than the others, the others do bring in a highly specialized skill that is of value.
It’s one thing to work remotely with purely digital content like text, but it is entirely another thing to work remotely with professionals that involve the manipulation/arrangement of physical elements to create digital content! The interesting difference is the quality of output – the VOXI ad was done using a phone camera that enabled 4K video quality, while the Vogue shoot was done using FaceTime!