From the very beginning of this COVID pandemic, we all thought we would be back to the offices and hosting in-person events two weeks after the initial lockdown... little did we know, we would get to the one year of this work-from-home scenario.
Since my last post in November 2020, the workload for our Event Production (EP) team at Google has increased quite a bit. Between more Google teams learning about the production value our team can provide and also commissioning/setting up new EP Spaces in the office, our weekly schedule is packed with mostly events and many more sessions of testing! While no in-person events are occurring at Google, until at least July, these new EP Spaces will most likely be utilized to expand the capacity of our team to produce more digital events. Another huge part of these digital events is lots of pre-recording sessions and pre-event editing... which provides event hosts the ability to coordinate multiple presenters and speakers to record their sessions ahead of time, and hires our EP Team to edit these sessions together for a cohesive final video.
On the other hand, my part-time/freelance job at Barclays Center has picked up and is getting busy again with a full schedule of Nets games. Even though there are no fans allowed, we are still brought in to support the visual presentation of the game (including pumping in crowd noise, so the players can pretend there are fans in the stands) and also, assist media personnel with their AV/IT needs.
At the time of this post, I think we can optimistically say that society is at the "beginning of the end" of this pandemic - with numbers of cases/deaths/etc decreasing and the growing availability of the vaccine.
