One year and a pandemic later…
Movidiam Head of Content Georgia reflects on 2020 — and her first year in the job!
In February 2020, I wrote an article for the Movidiam Blog about my first month in my job. It was about meeting with creatives (in person!), and understanding their most fundamental concerns when it comes to careers in the arts — especially branded content. It covered financial issues, creative freedom, job security, and their wildest creative ambitions.
On March 11th 2020, the Movidiam office packed up and moved home — 12 days before the UK went into full national lockdown.
Today, January 7th 2021, is my first anniversary at Movidiam. I’ve spent almost all of my time at Movidiam working remotely from my sofa, chugging endless cups of tea. We were extremely fortunate that the Movidiam team is streamlined and functions almost entirely online, so even when lockdown included a ban on in-person filming, we could still create. And create we did!
We were able to come up with innovative ways to work within the new restrictions, including several large scale projects with Z by HP, Intel and others.
However, at the root of our 2020 projects has been social responsibility. As a company that could carry on, that did not have to shut everything down and go without work for months on end, to ignore what was happening to other creatives all over the world would have been irresponsible. Over the first few months of the pandemic, my job involved working out as many ways as possible to uplift members of our community. We set up weekly features, reworking our newsletter to be almost entirely focused on features and showcases — promoting work in any form. We started sharing weekly Creativity Under Quarantine features, looking at the work being produced under extreme restrictions, and highlighted members of the film community that do not historically get put in the spotlight — from colourists to sound designers, and everything in between.
We’ve also gone into resource producing — publishing early production safety guidance, and digging out all the lockdown offers and freebies creatives could take advantage of (which has naturally been our most popular blog post of the year, too).
I’m very proud of the year we’ve had, even if it has been very different from the year that I envisaged on my first day in this position in January 2020. Once we could get back to filming we launched a national campaign with Z by HP and Intel UK, creating not just branded content, but opportunities for young creatives. We sourced £100,000 of creative industry prizes to give out to young people, at a time in which education had been turned upside down for many, and the future of the British film industry was very unsure. We produced free educational content, which is still available now to anyone that might need it.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the conversations we had with creatives in January 2020, about their biggest concerns and wildest dreams, set the stage for our year. We’re still taking in submissions, polling the opinions of our members, trying to understand as best we can what are the most pressing issues for our community as this situation continues. It’s just that now the concerns are a little more unwieldy than clients who ask for too many revisions and don’t pay on time.
