The Never-Ending Cycle of Digital Events

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.

8 months down... 8 months to go (at least)!

 These past eight (8) months has taken forever, it feels... and we are still in the thick of this pandemic with full-on remote work, virtual meetings, and more!

In the beginning, we all thought this stay-at-home orders and working from home situation would last a month... but 8 months later, we are still here but with quick thinking and fast modifications, my event production team and our work is just as busy as if we were in-person.

Back in early April, until around June, we were trying to figure out how to effectively run our events in a digital, remote world. Most of my time was spent searching for and participating in online courses, video training, and virtual webinars... some focusing on equipment features, some on software possibilities, and others discussed the media/events/production industry as a whole. By mid-June, the Event Production (EP) New York team was working with colleagues around the world to figure out best practices and troubleshooting with each other and researching different production platforms to enhance the virtual meetings that we were producing. Now, in November, our global EP team has a plethora of production solutions available to us - both internal systems and third-party platforms that we are utilizing to create a higher-level of production for these digital events.

I often tell people that, especially in this digital world, my role is to work with Google departments to produce a highly-visual and engaging event-that is more than just talking heads and a screen-share. As Google recently announced that the offices would not *fully* reopen until July 1, 2021... so this remote, virtual world is our new normal.

Oh, and only a few weeks ago, I passed my one year Google-versary... what a wild year it has been!!