Jacqueline Hewer, co-founder and creative director at UK indie Brown Bob Films, known for its fixed-rig access documentaries about the UK’s National Health Service, discusses how the coronavirus has affected her business.
Jacqueline Hewer
How has the coronavirus crisis, the lockdown and the production hiatus affected your business?
It’s changed the day-to-day in every conceivable, possible way. We closed the office after the government advice changed. Everybody is working from home. We’re trying to get remote editing going for the one series that had more or less finished filming so we’re in a position to edit. By the time you have a meeting and come up with plans A, B, C and D, two hours later everything is irrelevant because the world has moved on. We’ve got to be massively agile at all times. The teams have been brilliant at understanding that.
We do a lot of work with the NHS [National Health Service]. We do Inside the Ambulance for UKTV and we were planning to do a new series, starting in a couple of weeks, filming in an accident and emergency department and that’s gone on ice. We’ve almost finished filming Inside the Ambulance, so that’s the one we’re taking into the edit to see how far we can get with that. We have, unfortunately, had to let people go who were already with us or had contracts coming up. That’s heart-breaking all round, particularly when you know there’s no other work out there for people.
Can your editors work from home easily?
We don’t have in-house editing, we work with Rapid Pictures and its sister company Radiant. They had made contingency plans to allow remote editing. Everything went so quickly. As soon as there was in inkling we might have to go from home, they ramped up plans. They’re delivering edit suites to the homes of our editors and we’ll have editors working remotely, edit producers sitting in a different place as opposed to the same edit suite as you would ordinarily. We’ll see how it works. We’ve pared back the number of suites we have working on the same project. The massive danger is you can carry on going, filling your time as long as you can, but then you’ve used up all your weeks in the schedule and budget and you pop out the other end and you’ve still only got a half-finished series.
Are you still pitching things?
At the moment we’re still optimistically developing, talking to key commissioners about whether we can repackage existing content. We’ve delivered 100 episodes of Inside the Ambulance, so can we repackage that content to make quick-turnaround series that don’t need new filming? Can we do an archive show? Something that doesn’t require anything brand new.
A lot of what we do is based around access and while a lot of places have closed down, we think it’s possibly a good time to approach press officers who might be quieter than usual – they might be glad of their phone ringing. We’re optimistically carrying on our level of calls to places we might want to film with a view to getting the conversations going with commissioners so when we can do things again we’ve got things lined up and we’re not starting from zero.
Brown Bob Films is looking at repackaging Inside the Ambulance
Has Inside the Ambulance given you any access to this outbreak from the inside, because that would presumably be attractive to commissioners?
We’ve been filming over the last 10 weeks. Coronavirus wasn’t massive at the start but we were aware of it, then quite quickly we had to draw up protocols around it – what happens if the ambulance we’re filming in goes to a suspected case? We thought maybe there’s something interesting to do on the inside while this unfolds, but it escalated really quickly.
The ambulance service has to concentrate on what they’re doing, not worry about us being part of their lives. We have production teams present, we’re in touch with press officers, we still want to go back and do master interviews. So in the end we got to within a week of the scheduled end of filming when the plug was pulled, and that was done for all the right reasons. There was a moment we thought we might be in just the right place at the right time, but in reality we’re not.
You only very recently recruited to open a US office. How has that been affected?
Interestingly, I’m not sure if it is because they’ve been in more drastic measures for longer or if its cultural positivity, but we have had more conversations with the US this week than the UK channels. There is a real drive, an appetite there to have content ready to go and shoot. It feels like commissioning is happening apace there. We’re all a bit still in shock here. We had quite a lot on our slate already and interesting conversations, and that feels quite positive at the moment.
Have the statements from the UK chancellor about support for small businesses, employees, freelanceers and so on been reassuring?
I did find it reassuring, I think because it’s affecting everybody and every sector all over the country – we’re all in it together. As a small business you feel incredibly vulnerable but I felt there was the right intention and the right noises being made. The devil will be in the detail but at that stage I felt like I only needed a statement of intention, and that has been quite reassuring.
