COVID-19 forced the postponement of three days of filming on 5e rank.
Normally, Maude Guérin and company should have packed up today, but since the owners of the home where several scenes were to be filmed contracted the disease and must be placed in quarantine, the team will take back the necklace after the holidays, January 5, 6 and 7, in another house.
Reached by phone, producer Joanne Forgues (Productions Casablanca) indicates that she is crossing her fingers to be able to complete her shoot in two weeks, despite the upsurge that is observed everywhere in Quebec due to the Omicron variant.
For the moment, no member of the team of 5e rank was not declared positive, but the pandemic worries.
” It’s time to [nos tournages] end, because we feel the stress rising, comments Joanne Forgues. On set, people are nervous. ”
“Every day, we see the number of cases increasing,” she continues. And in the middle, there are quite a few. Every day, we receive emails from people who have it. Of course, it’s a little stressful. ”
“Very, very severe”
5e rank was the first fiction series to resume its activities, in June 2020, after the entry into force of the Guide to workplace health standards for the audiovisual industry, which governs filming in a pandemic.
Earlier this year, some measures were lightened, but Joanne Forgues remained “very, very severe”: permanently masked, even when traveling by car, snacking outside, distancing, and so on.
“Whenever an actor or a technician had symptoms, he was sent to be tested immediately, and until he had obtained his result, he stayed away from the set, says the producer. We have sometimes been criticized. People thought we were exaggerating, but we wanted to put the odds on our side to avoid an outbreak. ”
“We shoot outside a lot, that helps us,” she adds. Most annual series like 5e row are shot in the studio, in more closed places. Since we don’t have a studio, we shoot in much more ventilated places, and as soon as we can do a scene outside, that’s what we do. ”