How are you earning money or working on projects during the Pandemic/Coronavirus?

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analogs

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Curious to know how people are keeping themselves afloat or working on projects when there are limitations due to the Coronavirus?

As for me, I have been mostly working on my skills, expanding my knowledge, working on my own self projects and fixing/improving on things that I should have done a long time ago.
 
I’m pretty well doing the same as you. Also, about to do some oral history interviews; this will test me as it will be in VERY reverberant hall.
 
Many are doing what you are...some are still working here and there...and others have new jobs, careers.
 
Apparently we're all just posting on dvxuser instead :)

My business is usually 80% shooting and 20% editing. Now those proportions are reversed and I'm only doing about 25-30% of the volume I was doing before. UI helps keep me afloat during dry weeks.

I thought as NYC was legally open for more types of work that shoots would restart. But a lot of the corporate and office-based stuff is still dead for me. Weddings people are talking about something late August, something in October. No idea if those will go through.

Direct work for small businesses is the only type of work I have continued to have. Some editing for The Tapping Solution (meditation books and courses), a shoot for a small sex toys company, some edits for an art dealer, and currently editing a presentation for an architecture firm.

I'm seeing more jobs posts lately for low-budget indy stuff but not much else, although there have continued to be full-time jobs posted to do remote work this whole time, albeit somewhat fewer than before.

For the most part, it feels like being in Casablanca. We "wait. And wait. And wait."

Seems like a good time to learn new skills. My motion graphics game has always been weak...
 
Currently earning money and working by working and earning money. Being willing, able, and educated to work safely with Wuhan floating about has opened a few doors (including the White House and DOJ, which was pretty nifty). For one, I became ultra-flexible... finally shot my first wedding (more a live stream than anything)... was hired by a church to shoot weekly prayer services, something I haven't done for like a decade. Much of it isn't big money, but it's honest and uplifting. Still haven't gotten sick, pretty much like I wasn't getting sick working around hospitals and bio research labs for years before this... Perhaps it's because I'm the perfect picture of general health and wellness in the style of all those WalMart cashiers that are still hanging tough. There is power in pudge, apparently.

Income is waaaay off from 2019 nonetheless. On the exact day in mid-March that all my work got cancelled, debt consolidation and securing as much credit as feasible became agenda #1. Thankfully, that dropped our required monthly cough-up down to levels we can still manage with the decreased income. Plenty of workless weeks, but the plugging-away persists. Virginia has been reticent to actually pay any of the promised PUA unemployment assistance for the self-employed, so after weeks of making "way too much money" to earn my beaurocrat-calculated ~$150 windfall, I quit applying. Seriously doubt I'd ever get a job referral from an unemployment check anyway.

In the early days, I consumed just about all of the free training and workshop materials that several big names pushed... which in the end is a little frustrating when I've barely had any jobs that justified constructing a Swiss-frame booklight. Whatever "time off" I have has been devoted to kids, wife, home repair, gardening, raising a lot of meat birds, and generally trying to be an ant instead of a grasshopper, because winter is coming. The whole "bored at home" trend is outlandish.
 
Last September I was offered a part-time, year-long contract doing production and editing work for one of my bigger clients. 24 hours of work per week, with flexibility to move my days around to accommodate other clients. I was reluctant to take it for fear that it would interfere with longer form jobs, but I had just purchased a condo and the prospect of some steady income for the first time in years won out. Now, I am SO glad that I took the position. I've been making enough to get by. I haven't had any work from my other regular clients, or anyone for that matter. Many of my clients are on rolling furloughs themselves. Granted, I haven't been pursuing freelance work as much as usual. It seems like it should go to others who have been hit harder by this.

That being said, my contract ends in late September and other than shaking the trees, I don't have much of a strategy worked out. I know some talented people in production and post who have already embarked on new careers. I'm hoping that I won't have to do the same.

Other than that, I've been doing my usual hiking/backpacking/adventure photography (I've been keeping a hobbyist photography blog), berating myself for not having used this time to write a backlog of poignant and totally shootable narrative scripts, and trying not to waste too much time on YouTube or eBay.
 
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Pretty much all my shooting jobs and projects where canceled for the last 3 months, and I got only some post jobs (no wonder if nobody is shooting) - now they are coming back slowly, but not like before the "post normal".

I paid the bills with some webdesign and social media work - I totally hate both, but what do you gonna do?

We are doing actually pretty good here in Germany, when it comes to new infections,
and the ICUs are literally empty (only a handfull of Covid patients in the whole country), but the economy is at total mess by now.
 
I've had a recent load of work doing "virtual" trade show videos; at least that's what they are calling them. No matter what area of business, vendors who usually go to the big trade shows are now having to hustle to present their wares to distributors with uploaded video. You guys that do corporate work might want to call your clients and ask if their distributors are requesting this. And you don't have to low-ball as this type of presentation is saving money over what they usually spend on airlines and hotels for their sales force. Probably a lot of green screen material being sold these days eh?
 
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