Editor’s Note: The world changed right before our very eyes. We now work, live, exercise and entertain ourselves in our homes. This is the new normal. In this new on-going series, we check in on ad agencies, production companies, post-houses, and anyone else who wants to talk about their personal experiences during this coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.
Bottle Rocket Media is a video content agency that boasts more than a hundred industry awards and a staff of eleven.
Like most of the world, the group at Bottle Rocket Media has been working from home since March 16. Since then we have been communicating using video chats, the phone, slack, email, and text. To put it another way, just another day at the office.
While we are proponents of working through the creative process together, in the studio together, it has become clear these past few weeks that our team has refined the concept of together as we maintain strong communication and robust creativity. Except, of course, we miss one another and our clients and life on set and Le Colombe coffee on Randolph street.
Today, at our daily standup Dan complimented Siobhan on her vaulted ceilings and the team discussed toilet paper. I guess this is the new normal. We are more intimate than we were before (which is hard to believe) and as a result we are more concerned about one another’s well being. And it’s not just with our team, but with all of our clients and vendors and idle crews as well.
It seems necessary to address the technical aspects of working from home when discussing the new normal, but there really is very little to discuss in this area. At the end of the day on Friday the thirteenth we packed up our workstations, consolidated our media and went home, only to reconnect for our usual Monday morning meeting via Google Meet. Oh, I guess we did have one small hiccup with our server so we called our IT Guru, Adam of Most Training & Consulting. He logged in remotely, killed a Gremlin or two, and we were good to go.
Beside the team themselves, a few more work-from-home honorable mentions go to Slack, Frame io, Sprout, Microsoft, Google, and of course the entire Adobe family.
And as we have been working away these past few weeks we can now say that the anxiety of working from home was much greater than the actual task of working from home. Uncooperative kids and noisy roommates and poor internet connections begone. At the end of the day, each of us has found at least one reason to wake up and do it all over again tomorrow.
Here are a few of the unexpected perks we have learned in the first few weeks of working from home.
Which leaves a little more time for extracurriculars.
As we continue to push forward, waiting for the film permit office to reopen, we know that our motion design team is going to be busy this Springtime. With production grinding to a halt from coast to coast our clients have allowed us to get creative with previously shot footage and stock footage, motion design, and animation. So until we get testing and it is safe to be on location again we will continue to tell stories and deliver messages as we’ve always done, keeping an eye out for unexpected benefits along the way.
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What’s your New Normal? Send your story to editor, barb@reelchicago.com. We want to hear about it.
