Beach House Co-founders on how they are handling business during the Covid-19 pandemic
Donovan Chan & Jocelyn Little
JOCELYN LITTLE & DONOVAN CHAN Creative Directors, Beach House Pictures Singapore
Below is an excerpt from the Variety piece on how media professionals are handling professional and personal lives during quarantine: https://variety.com/2020/biz/global/coronavirus-paolo-sorrentino-nicolas-celis-roma-mattie-do-1234612320/
Excerpt:
At Beach House Pictures, COVID-19 is a harsh reality we’ve been facing since January. As a business operating in both Asia and the U.S., we’ve experienced a double dose of the pandemic shutdown — first with the crisis in China, and again as it spread to the rest of the world. This time has been marked by some heavy disappointments. 2019 was a very productive year for us, and we headed into 2020 energized and excited about opportunities ahead. In the blink of an eye, everything changed. Within a month, we had about 10 projects put on pause or shut down indefinitely. The results of years of effort were suddenly in question. But there was no time to be rattled — we had to act quickly.
When the pandemic hit Asia in January, we organized a task force consisting of HR, production, post and technology to help us tackle multiple challenges simultaneously. We pushed to find workarounds to help keep our team intact and quickly implemented guidelines to manage postponed production timelines. We made sure that we had the right technology to keep communications smooth and to ensure that post-production continued. We kicked our creative discussions into hyperdrive as we worked to fill holes in our slate and develop new “pandemic-proof” content.
While the impact of this crisis continues to be heartbreaking, it’s also taught us a lot about our resilience as a company. In many ways, this pandemic has become an intensely productive time for our team. We’ve found new partners and potential new projects we wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. We’ve been unafraid to take big swings with ideas, and have reached deep into our network to secure new opportunities. We’ve taken in the disappointments and tried to move past them gracefully. In the context of what has been going on in the world, the rest feels like small potatoes, really.
As the industry looks to take steps to reopen, the conversations we’ve had with our platform and production partners, as well as internally with our colleagues at Blue Ant Media, on best practices have instilled a lot of hope and confidence. It has been inspiring to witness how our team and the industry have come together during this difficult time, and we will emerge from this a stronger company. And while we’re not past this yet, we will remain vigilant and keep pushing ahead, and know that we are set up to handle whatever comes next.