Staying engaged with the creative community virtually

With film and TV production shut down in many parts of the world, millions of people who work in these industries remain at home. At Netflix, we’ve always viewed workshops, training programs and panels as essential to helping these industries grow and expand. 

Fortunately we’ve been able to move many of them online. While these virtual events cannot replace in-person interactions and networking opportunities, they’ve opened up new possibilities.

Recently, we held a virtual Q&A session for the editing community in India with Emmy-award winning editor Stuart Bass, ACE (The Office, Arrested Development, A Series of Unfortunate Events). During the nearly two-hour discussion, topics included pacing for episodic series, the shorter turnaround times compared to feature films, and utilising the latest technology. Stuart was able to show participants a typical schedule for series editing and share his own tips for how to juggle editing multiple episodes at different stages of the process at the same time. He also touched on working with different collaborators including editors working on other episodes, different directors helming different episodes and the series’ writers. 

This is the just the latest session we’ve held in India. In October of 2019, Netflix launched its first post-production training program in Asia in partnership with the Government of Maharashtra and Amsterdam Post Lab (APostLab). The first edition of the program was held in Mumbai that same month. The four-day event focused on various aspects of series post-production and brought creative professionals from India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Our India post-production and global outreach teams had originally planned the Q&A session with Stuart as an in-person dinner scheduled for May. However, the lockdown in India made that impossible. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to engage and educate the editing community, we shifted to a virtual Q&A moderated by two members of our post-production team in India.  

Moving the event online was not cut and dry. Our team went through multiple rehearsals to ensure everything was taken care of behind-the-scenes so that attendees could still have a meaningful virtual experience. 

Another challenge was varying internet bandwidth --  one of our moderators missed a rehearsal because of connectivity issues, so we made sure to have a back-up ready, just in case. (Thankfully, everyone was able to connect on the day!)  However, going virtual also has its upsides, like allowing for an additional guest speaker: Bass’ longtime assistant editor Preston Rapp (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard), who shared insight into the workflow between picture editors, visual effects editors, sound mixers, and other post-production teams.

Going virtual also opened up the opportunity for more participants. Along with editors, assistant editors and post-production supervisors, we were joined by writers, directors and showrunners present, several of whom are working on Netflix series and films. 

We’re all looking forward to resuming in-person events. Until then, we’re planning more online panels like this for the creative community so that we can continue to share valuable learnings and engage with these collaborators around the world.

-The Global Outreach Team