[Written by Charlie Clarke]
Well, how do we start? 2020 has been quite the year for sure, not necessarily in the way we had hoped, but we aren’t the kind of team to let a global pandemic stop us (plus we don’t want this to be the most depressingblog post ever) so, like many creatives out there, we have tried our best to keep going in this “new normal” Boris keeps banging on about!
As a filmmaking studio, most of 2020 was pretty much written off in terms of creating new content, but that didn’t stop us taking things online! One of the biggest changes to the way we work was learning what we could do through various online channels, we’ve Skyped, Zoomed, learned how to use Notion and Discord, all of which have brought challenges, but in so many ways have made certain elements of what we do easier!
Most noticeably you might have seen us relaunch the podcast, which we all hope you’re enjoyingand lovinghearing all of our dulcet tones again! Previous to COVID/lockdown/tiers/urghhhh…we used to get together in person,which in itself was often tricky as the team are split across 3 cities!Eventuallythe podcast was put on pause, but with everything that happened this year we looked for another way of working and we now record the podcast episodes over Discord. To be honest, we aren’t sure why we weren’t doing this before! All the crew have invested in a (fairly budget) headset and mic, we decide ahead of time which of us are gonna jump on that episode, Jonno plans the episode content,we do any individual prep we need toand then we record, but we don’t have to all be in the same room and it has just made recording so much easier!
We were also very lucky this year that we were still able to release our annual Halloween short, although it wasn’t quite what we had originally envisioned. We did have a script written and ready to go and a very minimal, socially distant shoot was planned whilst restrictions in our area weren’t as harsh. However, just as we were gearing up to shoot we went into the highest tier in the UK tier system and we couldn’t go ahead with our plans. Don’t worry though, you will still get to see that script come to life at some point in the future, so no spoilers here!
Luckily, we had a plan B! That plan B was ‘Blood Money’.We had shot ‘Blood Money’ in 2019, butnot quite completed the project for release and had planned to do a bit of reshooting so we could get it out there.Of course restrictions this year meant that we couldn’t do the amount of additional shooting we had originally planned, but with a bit of help from ‘bubbled’ family members and a bit of editing wizardry from Liam, we managed to pull it off! Our annual Halloween shorts mean the world to us and the thought of possibly not being able to release one for the first time since SuperfreakMedia began was horrible, so although it wasn’t what we originally planned, we are so grateful we had something in the bag we could releasefor you guys!
Despite it being the most challenging year since we started, 2020 has been the year of delegation –and it’s been great –we had the time to discuss what everyone’s roles are now and decide which branches of our content everyone would be responsible for and I think the whole team agree we have a much clearerpicture of what the future of SuperfreakMedia looks like now. We are so excited to see what is next for us, because we promise we have some AWESOME things in the pipeline!
Looking forward to 2021, we are obviously hoping that things start to ease up and we can get going at full steam again.Before we do we,of course,put the health and safety of our team and the people we work with first, so will be working as best we can prepping and doing things digitally until we can reunite in person.
Lastly, we just want to give a massive THANK YOU to you guys, our viewers, subscribers, listeners, fans, for the unwavering support you have given us this year. We know we’ve been way quieter than usual, but we’ve been busy in the background and we promise that we will be back to delivering all the usual killer content you’ve come to expect from us and some very exciting new ventures as soon as possible.
Stay safe and keep it creepy!
Team Superfreak.
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