How we safely work during COVID-19

1. Appointed “Safety Officer”

Considering Production Manager Natashia is SKLTN CRW’s answer lady (we mean that in the best possible way), it made sense to have her coordinate and oversee our COVID-19 safety measures. She’s taken on the challenge and stepped up in huge ways to run a tight ship.

2. Educate our Staff

While Tash is the company’s lead expert, the entire SKLTN CRW staff has undergone training and earned certifications from Safe Sets International so that we’re running safe sets.

The online training taught us more information about COVID-19, how to properly take someone’s temperature, which screening questions to ask, how to wear a mask properly, and how to stay safe in various scenarios. Further, our crew learned best practices around cleaning equipment and tools properly.

3. Develop On Set Guidelines

While keeping the Skltn Crw up to speed with updated information and requirements was important, communicating to our clients, partners, and actors was a must. While a new topic, reliance on communication is very much in line with our philosophy for a smooth video production project

To that end, Skltn Crw delivers its on-set guidelines via PDF to anyone working with us. Our guidelines follow the best practices put together by the Buffalo, Syracuse and New York State film commissions.

4. Coordinate On-Set Safety Efforts

Setting out on-set expectations is one thing. Making sure we’re maintaining a clean, healthy, and safe environment is another. That’s where Skltn Crw’s credentialed crew comes in.

At the beginning of the day, we talk to our actors about coming to set camera ready with hair and make-up done as much as possible. Blow dryers are now verboten, considering their prime movers of potentially dangerous air droplets. Likewise, on-set ironing is kept to a minimum.

On the occasions where we have to do a person’s make-up or touch them up on set, we put on gloves and face shields in addition to wearing a regular face mask, plus we use as many single-use items as possible. And anytime we need to mic up a talent, we put on disposable gloves and sanitize the microphones once we remove them from talent.

Lighting, audio, and camera crews know that they have to maintain their departments. The goal is to produce more awareness on our sets and avoid cross-contamination between departments.

So far the clear communication and on-set-awareness have been helpful for us all, allowing us to get back to shooting and help our clients.

5. Stock up on Supplies

None of this would be possible without access to PPE and cleaning supplies, which has not been easy. Luckily, we had a lot of sanitizing products long before the pandemic, so now we buy PPE and cleaning supplies as we find them. The most challenging product to find is a disinfecting spray like Lysol.

Many of the products we need and create Safety Kits (gloves, masks, disinfecting wipes, disinfecting spray, goggles, and hand sanitizer) are starting to become easier to find and arriving quicker. However, there is a lot of shopping around and in-person to locate some of these items that are still hard to find or cannot be purchased online.

Many of these costs have been absorbed into our budgets, but there may come a time when we’ll have to discuss, especially on larger projects where more supplies are required. We recently did a multi-day shoot, and we used nearly an entire box of 200 disposable gloves, a whole can of Lysol spray, lots of Clorox cleaning spray, countless rolls of paper towels, multiple packs of disinfecting wipes, and lots and lots of single-use make-up brushes. It’s definitely a new era for production!

Our main goal is to serve you and keep us all safe in the process. We’re continuing to watch, learn, and evolve our processes by keeping up to date on the fluid rules and restrictions for our industry.

As the light at the end of the tunnel becomes brighter, we foresee many businesses turning to video marketing and advertising in the post-COVID world. So, let’s get your business’ video production off the ground.