Adapting to Unprecedented Times

Hi all,

And welcome to the very first digital-only edition of NZTECHO. Right up until the second week of March, we had always intended to get this magazine into print. But the situation just moved too fast.

So instead, it’s been assembled from home offices and kitchen tables up and down the country. It seems odd now, that only a week or two ago, the phrase ‘stay inside your bubble’ wouldn’t have meant anything to us. And now it’s our - temporary – reality.

You’ll find a lot of great pieces to read in this issue, as well as a few industry announcements that we are choosing to reproduce and pass on in this format, in case you are not getting them by email.

We are also debuting a new regular column from the Film Commission. It’s not the ideal issue to first appear in, but we look forward to future columns as well.

The situation we are in is completely unprecedented. A war doesn’t keep people away from their workplaces. In fact, quite the opposite. Even the film industry has its own, unique and well-defined role in a war.

But a global Pandemic is different. And our industry, which entirely relies on teams of people operating in the same spaces, has for the time being, basically ceased to exist.

Shout out to all you digital animators out there. We’re happy that you guys at least can still access the tools and the co-workers you need to keep on making films!

For the rest of us, this isn’t going to get better anytime soon. Even when the restrictions are lifted for local business and local travel, and when our TV shows and advertising industries come back on stream, we will still be waiting for months before any international productions have reorganized themselves well enough to travel across the world to shoot again. And we can certainly expect some studios and productions to not survive this crisis.

On the plus side, our Government has acted quickly and pretty generously, giving New Zealand industries and workers a far softer landing than those in many other countries are facing. We can at least remember to be thankful for that, amid all the economic doom and gloom.

But, more than that, my experience of lock-down, so far, has been a fair amount of cheerfulness and a reassessing of priorities. People I haven’t thought of much in years have been calling up and messaging – ‘just checking in’ – the queues at my local supermarket have been orderly, well spaced and polite, with no security guards needed to tell anybody not to be a Muppet. To tell you the truth, I’m actually liking being able to ride my bike around the city streets, without worrying every second whether some numpty in a ute is about to run me down because he is too busy texting to notice where he was on the road.

Nobody’s going to thank us for being unrealistic, or for not thinking very hard about how we all get through this. But for now, with the situation completely out our control, worry and anxiety are pointless. So, let’s at least try to focus on the positives that are coming out of this.

Stay safe, be kind.

And wash your bloody hands.

Love your work,

GT