July/August Update

With that slight sense of back to school, the summer holidays draw to a close and we move into a time of year that gets very busy for Quite Frankly. That said we’ve had an interesting variety of briefs and productions over the summer with Unilever and Diageo keeping us busy.

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?A very warm welcome to Grace who joins Lies’s team as an AP and really impressed us during the interview process. It always amazes me that when I first became interested in making films, I wasn’t allowed to touch a camera, let alone go in an edit suite by the union reps at the BBC. Now candidates with no real work experience have Youtube channels of their own, filled with films they’ve produced, directed, shot and mixed themselves.?And some are pretty good!

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This week we have a team on location in Rotterdam, which coincidentally was where Lucy and I were looking to open another office post Brexit. In hindsight, since the pandemic, do we really need another physical studio, and does it matter where people actually sit? A question I know a lot of service and creative business owners continue to ask themselves.

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A highlight for us last month was a visit to Garden Studios in Park Royal and starting to scratch the surface of what is possible in a virtual environment. It’s honestly mind blowing and really raises questions around how much you need to put crews on planes. For the kind of work that we do, where sustainability is considered at every stage, there’s a very strong argument for doing more in a virtual environment.

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And keeping with the Garden theme, our Foundation is about to start working with the Garden Classroom in Highbury. Each year, we make pro bono films for causes that touch us, for organisations that could never afford to make films professionally. When we moved to Clerkenwell, we wanted to be good local citizens and the Garden Classroom seemed the perfect fit. It teaches inner city children about the wonders of nature and the environment generally – hence the comedy photos of Claire and I in bee-keeping suits. Visiting the hives within a stone’s throw of where Arsenal used to play was actually incredibly cool.

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?Finally, love was in the air this summer. Bobby got down on one knee in Paris, Ben Powis went on an extended honeymoon to the USA and now we’re preparing for Sam and Rhiannon’s nuptials.

Quite Frankly that’s a lot of love…… Jez