Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1262492
38 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E the coronavirus and started calling it COVID -19, some of our VFX vendors realized that their output would be seri- ously impacted when they had to switch to working remotely. They informed Jay and Liz that they wouldn't be able to meet their deadlines for the last couple of episodes. And since we really couldn't air the episodes without these visual effects, our delivery schedule was in jeopardy. On Monday, March 16, the six San Francisco Bay Area Counties declared shelter-in-place, and we knew it was just a matter of days before Los Angeles was shut down. On Thursday, March 19, Governor Newsom declared shelter-in- place to be state law. On Friday, March 20, Kelly, Ron Madnick and I had a con- ference call with Dauri Chase, our HBO Post Production Senior VP; several HBO broadcast engineers; and Tom Vice, the Senior VP at Fotokem. Kelly, Ron, and I laid out our remote workflow plan for the HBO folks. Tom explained how he was setting up workstations in the homes of our color timer, Kostas Theodosiou, and our two conform editors, Alex Sanchez and Ismael Salas. Dauri's headline was that she had conferred with the other departments at HBO and got them to agree that we could deliver the shows a week before they aired rather than 3 weeks, which was our normal delivery requirement. Now Visual Effects and the rest of our departments would have an additional 2 weeks to complete the work. Jay had already shifted shots away from the vendors who couldn't meet the dead- lines and given them to other VFX houses spread across the planet. So there was a path to delivery, if – and this was a big if -- our remote plan held together. By Monday, March 23, having already delivered the first four episodes to HBO, we went remote. Our Avid vendor, Digital Vortechs, had moved four Avid systems into homes: assistant editor Yoni Reiss got one, VFX editor Jill Paget, and VFX assistant e d i to r s A n d re w T ra i n o r a n d A l e x i s Corrigan each got one. Assistant editor Tamar Feder had a software-only version of Media Composer on her home desktop system. Thomas Sabinsky had been the assistant on the season finale, which had the most work left to be done. He contin- ued to work at Kilter Films. Other than our night security guard Rob Morgan, Thomas was generally the lone soul in an 8,600 sq. ft. building (I snuck in a couple of times to do something that I couldn't do from home, but Thomas was on the first floor, and I was on the second floor). Our on-site Avid server had been pur- chased and engineered to prevent remote access - i.e., security breaches. Given that there was no advance time to set up a new server that allowed remote access, Ron determined that each remote Avid would have its own offline server, which neces- sitated the rental or purchase of quite a few drives to accommodate the volume of media files at each home – anywhere from 6 to 15 terabytes. Our standard was to honor the rule of shelter-in-place. In the case of our sound mix stage at Universal Studios, which re- mained open after March 23, the rule was no one working within six feet of anyone else. Though Fotokem decided to close its doors to all but a couple of maintenance engineers when shelter-in-place was announced, Universal took advantage of the law's exception for media companies as essential businesses. Physical pro- duction at the studio stopped, and most of its employees worked from home, but some facilities, including our mix stage, remained open. Our mixers, Keith Rogers and Ben Cook (who is also our sound de- signer), and their recordist, Rick Camara, continued to mix from the stage. Had Universal shut the stage down, forcing Keith and Ben to work separately from their homes, we might have missed our delivery dates. Our sound supervisor, Sue Cahill, and Chris Kaller, the music editor, decided to work from home. On mix playback days, up to 15 producers, writers, film editors, sound and music e d i to r s, a n d V F X s ta f f w o u l d j o i n a Clearview streaming session from their respective homes, listening through their computers to a 2 track stereo mix, and Liz Castro.