In Episode 1, Toronto-based serial entrepreneur Alex Kolodkin joins me to talk about how to make production as safe as possible while still in the midst of a pandemic.
After months of complete shutdown, film and TV production has now resumed in Canada’s major filming centres of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Not surprisingly, there is a ‘new normal’ in place.
While there have always been health & safety consultants on set, Covid-19 safety requirements are a lot more specific and constraining. Hint: they are more than just a matter of frequent hand washing and mask wearing. For example, “sneeze etiquette” is now a thing.
On top of physical distancing among actors and crew members, new guidelines now apply to everything from bathrooms and food to the number of consecutive hours spent on set or location.
In BC the term ‘depopulating the set’ has been coined. It refers not just to limiting the number of people on set to the strict minimum, but also to new practices such as directors working remotely and following along on monitors as well as camera operators filming from cranes when possible.
Meanwhile in Quebec, there are new limitations on shootings involving close physical contact between actors, be it love scenes or fight scenes.
To help on-screen and off-screen talent adjust to such changes, Alex Kolodkin started the virtual company Safe Sets International. Since June 2020, they've been providing education and delivering certification for on set safety.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
- What it’s been like for actors Andrew Bee and Ethan Berkeley-Garcia to go back to work (02:20)
- The most high-risk situations and the new basic drill for people arriving on set (05:35)
- The biggest resistance points to safety protocols on set (11:02)
- What motivated Alex Kolodkin to create Safe Sets International (12:35)
- The flip side of COVID-19 safety protocols when it comes to production sustainability (15:06)
In Episode 2, I'm joined by award-winning actor and founder of Reelworld Film Festival Tonya Williams to talk about ways to achieve meaningful and long-lasting racial representation in front of and behind the camera.
Her first step toward this goal was founding the Reelworld Film Festival back in 2001. The initial objective of the festival was to showcase Black actors, writers, producers and directors in Canada. It has since expanded to include Indigenous, Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latinx talent.
The festival’s 20th anniversary is coming up this October 2020 (14th-19th) and will be taking place online. Its newest feature, launched this summer, is an online database called Access Reelworld. It helps match racially diverse on-screen talent with writers, producers, and directors. Williams believes that now is the perfect moment for this kind of industry tool. The technology needed to build such a database has recently become much more affordable plus inclusion and equitable representation are top of mind priorities for producers, writers, directors, and networks.
On this episode of Now & Next Tonya also discusses how she defines success for the various initiatives she is driving and what she sees as the important work that still needs to be done.
In this episode, you'll learn more about:
- Rachel Lui’s experience as an Asian actor (1:54)
- How Tonya Williams' goals for Reelworld have changed over the festival’s 20 years (2:54)
- Inspiring data collection and leadership hiring initiatives from the U.K. and the U.S. (5:52)
- How the Reelworld Producers Program intends to solve the lack of representation of Canadian Black, Indigenous, People of Colour producers (9:02)
- Why Tonya and many others are not fans of the acronym BIPoC (12:10)
- The story of how the Access Reelworld database came to be (16:45)
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