Rebuilding Together: Screen Sector Resilience
A crazy three months
Since the last issue of NZTECHO was sent out to the membership a lot has changed and a hugely disruptive time has affected us all. While this has affected us all in a variety of different ways over the last few months, it’s my feeling that as a country this is perhaps one time where our geographic isolation has worked out to be a positive. As a lesser travelled country at the bottom of the world we had more warning and time to close our borders and achieve the practical elimination of the virus that we managed. This has also made us a more attractive destination in the short term for successfully rebooting our screen industry earlier than many other nations.
After talking to other screen industry professionals over the lockdown period it seems to me that due to the nature of our industry, we are well suited to weather the challenges than many other sectors for several reasons.
- Due to the lumpy business cycle we have experienced over the past 15 years, the periods of feast and famine that we all talk about. Having a 3-month period in a calendar year with minimal income is not out of the ordinary. In fact, it’s almost been expected, and many of us have to plan and budget for it, and this is without having access to the Wage Subsidy!
- Due to the nature of the film industry we have a guerrilla nature to the way we operate. Working out of trucks adapting to change and “making it happen.” While the lockdown shut down all productions shooting as much as any other business, we are sprouting up again just as fast. Many local shows and productions such as SPP started shooting in Level 3 and 2 and most of the offshore productions have only been held up by having to manage the process of getting key offshore personnel across the border. Now there seems to be a (semi) functioning quarantine process for getting essential crew through the gates, it looks like most of the offshore production that were lined up to begin shooting, are looking to kick off in the next two months.
I have spoken to many of my screen industry colleagues who say they enjoyed the lockdown period and used the time to rest, recharge and spend time with family and friends. While this may not be true for everyone especially those who lost loved ones, it seems that many people retained their optimism and came through the crisis keen to get back to production and reconnect with workmates.
Guild Subcommittees
As I discussed in the last issue the guild had kicked off a bunch of sub-committees to work on a range of initiatives to enhance the work situation of our members and develop what the guild can offer to its members.
- Continuous Hours Sub-Committee
This subcommittee consisting of Myself, Sean O’Neil, Peter McCaffery, and Christian Gower spent several hours emailing and meeting over Zoom to thrash out a set of SIGANZ endorsed continuous hours guidelines that will be posted on the website and be sent out to productions that plan to operate in NZ with a continuous hours framework.
When drafting these guidelines, we need to be balanced and speak to both the needs of crew and production, to get a set of guidelines that are fair and be likely to be adopted by productions in the future. I encourage members who are interested in the new proposed SIGANZ “French Hours” recommendation to review the document and email the guild if you have any queries or suggestions.
2.Crew Representative Sub-Committee
There was a general feeling that the way crew reps are selected and managed over the past few years lacked coordination and focus and became a poison chalice that everyone tried to avoid. The Guild wants to change this as we feel well-managed and supported crew representation on, and off set will be of benefit to all our members and crew all over the country.
We plan to:
- Develop a set of guidelines and protocols for crew reps to follow.- SIGANZ takes ownership of supporting the crew reps and approaching productions early in pre-production about facilitation of the selection and support of crew reps.- Providing a series of workshops about being a crew rep that double as a SIGANZ mixer across the major centres.
3.The Rate Guidelines Project
We have formed a sub-committee looking at compiling a comprehensive set of current screen industry rate guidelines that cover the different departments covered by the below-the-line crew SIGANZ represents. This will involve a common template for each department where the different roles are defined, and then current rates put alongside that reflect several different bands of production.
The plan is to have these rate cards accessible on the Screen Guild website and look to review and update them periodically in regard to tracking changes in both the actual rates and the “real” rates in relation to inflation.
Once we are tracking and monitoring NZ crew rates, we can start having informed discussion about rates over time, parity between jobs of a similar nature, our competitiveness with other regions, and more. The rate guidelines will be reviewed by a panel of producers to ensure that the process is balanced and fair to all parties and reflects the actual current rates in the marketplace.
I encourage any guild member who is interested or has something to offer to contribute to not only these sub-committees but also any other issues you feel the Guild should be looking at to get in touch with the Guild EO and get involved.
Here’s to a successful recovery for our industry from the seismic shocks of the beginning of this year and a safe and busy next six months.
