What now?

Right now it is March 31st, and there is currently no end in sight for this pandemic. We have been told several different timelines until eventually we arrived at the current timeline which is just indefinite. We are hearing that the country will be on lockdown for another 2–3 months. Our graduation and senior thesis presentation have been moved to an online platform. Legally I am not allowed to leave my house for “non-essential” work. Businesses everywhere are shutting down permanently or indefinitely, with small businesses taking the biggest hit. Right now there is only proposed legislation to provide a safety net for businesses and people in general but nothing has been passed yet.

What a time to be alive, and to start a business! In fact we just became legal about a week ago. So Origin Productions is now officially a legal entity in a time where we are legally not allowed to leave our houses. This poses a few problems for us. The point of my thesis project was to prove the viability of starting your own content creation business out of college and the fact is that it is not viable right now. That is out of my control but what I can do is adapt to the situation and steer my project in a different direction as far as my senior presentation goes. So what we are looking to do is a documentary style series that is 5 episodes long that is focused on this pandemic’s impact on small businesses and small business owners. It will also discuss where small businesses will be looking to go in the near future, and what predictions small business owners have for the future. These types of things will be coupled with anything happening in the political realm and any possible legislation that could be passed in the near future to affect the landscape of small businesses.

I wanted to make brief mention of how incompetent DJI is. I had ordered a stabilizer kit from them on March 3rd and on March 28th they still hadn’t even shipped it to me. So I cancelled my order and ordered the same thing off of Amazon on March 28th and they delivered on March 30th so now we have a massive improvement to our production quality.

For the next month and some change we will be focused on getting the website and its guide content up and running, posting on social media, and creating this new series that discusses these current events. I am also looking to do two short films by the time of presentation, so we are going to see if any of this is possible or if things continue to get worse. We are staying positive and looking for the opportunity to create.