Hybrid Event made easy!

Hybrid event with 40 people in the room and 150 viewers on Team.

In the last months I have been filming a lot livestream/hybrid events with very different setups. It requires some preparation but once the technical challenges are overcome, and hybrid event can bring the best of both digital and physical meetings: The energy of several people in a room and the convenience of not having to travel to Brussels.

One good indicator that an event is going well is when the comments on chats are about the content and not about some technical problems, the sound being the most common problem.

It is a team job

Hybrid event with keynote and panel. 3 participants are in the room, 2 are on Zoom displayed on a screen. 30 people in the room, 120 on Youtube during the event, over 450 views today.

My setup is relatively simple: I install 3 cameras in the room and mix the images in a smooth way alternating wide angle and close-ups on the speakers. I send this signal to a platform like Zoom or Teams ‘as if’ is was a webcam. So the room in Brussels is like a participant to a call. Other remote participants are also part of the conversation. The only difference is that the room is Brussels has several participants and they are filmed with a great camera, sometimes zoomed in, sometimes larger shoot.

Where it is a bit tricky, is that people on Zoom/Teams need to be managed: accepting new participants, muting microphones, sharing screen, reading the chat in case there is an important message, sending people to breakout rooms… All that requires an additional person that has a good understanding of theses platforms and can act quick when there is a problem (typically a participant forget to mute his microphone).

The best of both words?

Hybrid event for a small meeting. 4 participant in the room and 25 on a zoom call.

For any event organiser, it is really interesting to overcome the complications of having all the speakers present in the same room for an event. For the viewers it is a clear advantage to be able to watch the full event on Youtube either live or later. It is very common to see the number of views multiplied by 4 after an event.

One last thought about hybrid event:

All events are different, there is no one size fits all. A good hybrid event requires preparation and overcoming some technical issues that are never the same… For me as a video maker, that are the kind of challenges that makes these event exciting: Making hybrid events easy!

Giving the viewers another experience.

Good practice for webinar videos

I am asked quite often for some tips about how to look good on a webcam. Of course a webcam will never replace a proper camera, but with a bit of preparation and thinking, the experience can be much better:

Setting Up Your Room and Camera 

Room Considerations:

• Make the room as quiet as possible. Turn off anything that produces unwanted sound such as air conditioning, water coolers, or overhead lights that produce a hum; the microphones will pick up those noises. 

Camera:

• Avoid a cluttered background to ensure that your viewer’s attention remains focused on you. If you are speaking on behalf of an organization, it can be nice to have a backdrop of that organization in the frame (see example below:)

• Keep the camera at eye level. A camera placed looking up at your face creates an unflattering image. If you have a standing desk, adjust the height accordingly. Otherwise you can use books or another level surface to raise the camera up to eye level (see example below:) 

In case you are using a laptop or a phone, using a pile of books helps to make the camera at the right level. Note that when using a phone it is important to keep the device horizontally.  

Lighting

• Use soft, evenly balanced light such as a simple desk lamp with soft-white bulb. Consider use of a lamp shade or paper cut-outs to diffuse the light.

• DO keep the light source facing you. DO NOT place the main light source behind you. Back lighting subjects will be silhouetted and in shadow (see example below:).

Audio

• Good quality audio is just as important as the video quality. Consider using a quality USB microphone or use a headphone mic. 

• Position microphone in front of you at roughly a half arm length away.

• If using the computer microphone, check the settings of the microphone to make sure they are at their highest sensitivity.

Making the best of your Zoom seminar recording

In these strange times, all seminars or conferences are taking place on Zoom. It is a great tool on many fronts and the recording function helps a lot to keep a trace of what was discussed. But a bit like not everyone is watching a full recording of a conference, not everyone is watching a 2 hours Zoom seminar. Creating a highlight video with key messages discussed during the seminar is a good solution to make the best of these recordings, highlight important messages discussed during the seminar and give a second life to the seminar, especially on social media. But very often the quality of the videos is a weak and the sound is not very good…But with video making, there is alway a creative solution!

In the example below, the industry association for batteries in Europe, RECHARGE, recorded 3 seminars of 1,5 hours each and needed to highlight on Twitter some of the content discussed.

The good surprise is that the visual for the event was using a lot of square images of batteries and applications of batteries such as electric bikes or machines. We used that visual as a base for video and make the quote of the speakers appear in these squares. By doing that, we could use the raw content from Zoom that was recorded in mosaic mode without scaling or cropping too much the recordings. In some cases, we did had only the audio recording of the speaker and we used a picture. All worked really well and the campaign was a success.

Drone Pictures are just super cool

Vertical Video Syndrome?

Vertical videos are more and more in demand… I have been inquiring about that and found this awesome short video! I am not giving up though, I think ‘vv’ can be useful for some projects :-)

A cool challenge for smart students

Satellite images to help regions

That video is about the launch of a book telling how European regions are using Images from space to solve some of their problems. It is sometimes a bit technical but can be really interesting!

Fighting Cancer!

An event I covered called the European Cancer Forum. It took place in the wonderful Bibliothèque Solvay in Brussels. The event was great as it was giving a lots of hope on the new development on the fight against cancer.

The video is here:

and the short opening video is here:

Israel Tech scene

I was again lucky to follow a visit of Member of the Parliament to Israel to see the tech scene, visit some startups and try to get a sense of the fantastic successes coming from such a small country.

Some insights are in the video here:

the day we started streaming live!

At Itaka Media, the client is king, if the client asks for a livestream... we deliver! in that particular case, it was the last Brussels conference of the Estonian Presidency of the EU in partnership with the think-tank CEPS (see the intro video I did here). For the Estonians, the livestream was super important as they branded their presidency as the Digital Presidency and did a lot of livestream during their presidency especially in when events were taking place in Estonia. The event was a full day and we were requested to stream all the plenary sessions that represents more or less half of the day. 

For us, livestream was not exactly new as we did some tests here and there and delivered some livestream in addition to some services. For instance we did a livestream for an overbooked conference in Brussels but for many reasons it was complicated and not 100% satisfactory (link to the livestream changed in Youtube at the last moment and we had to tell the client during the steam :-) )

So the challenge was pretty high for us but you always have to start somewhere with these things. In the end, all went super well and the client was over the moon. The screen shot below shows that during the livestream of the event we reached over 15000 people and we had very often over 200 people watching even more in the beginning when big VIPs where there.   

Here are some take-aways from that experience: 

-Know your software: The client was using a Livestream.com account they opened to us. The platform is great and the software is really powerful... but it runs on PCs only! We discovered that 2 days before the event... Time to rent a proper PC and make all the test we were ready on the D-day :-)

-Get a dedicated internet connection: Together with the client we asked for a special LAN cable that would provide us a good and stable internet connection. We did some test the day before on the spot and all worked fine. We would have use the wi-fi nothing would have worked properly and the livestream would not have worked. 

-Get someone dedicated to the livestream: It is technical, it is computer intensive, many things can go wrong... so for these kind of big events, better have someone fully dedicated to that that knows what to do in case of problem. For instance, at one point after 2 hours of stream, a break happened in the stream. Alessio was there to reboot everything and the interruption was less than a minute.  

In conclusion, livestreaming has a great multiplying effect potential when used well (especially with Facebook). In order to get that, it needs some careful preparation and at Itaka Media we are ready for it!  

Video tweets at event put to a level with subtitles

Last year, we did some videos during an event and prepared them especially to be put on twitter during the event. In order to look professional and have a proper sound we did no use phones but a proper camera hooked to the sound table.

The process is the following: you need to film the event in continuous, when one of the speaker says something you like, you stop the camera, take the SD card, edit the video with an intro, name tag and outro and then publish on twitter immedialtly.  It is not simple but if you are well prepared and keep concentrate that works really well and we managed to get about 10 video tweets. Together with other tweets, the # of the event was trending that day! 

This year, we did the same but put it to an all new level adding subtiles :-) Indeed at an event, people are not listening to videos when they look at twitter and subtitles are making the difference. The process is the same, but during the edit we took some time to add subtitles manually to the video. It requires a good preparation and 2 persons as you always need a second eye for subtitles. But the result was really good and up to our expectations. Again the # of the event was trending and videos helped a lot but that time we are almost sure people knew what the videos were about :-)

Below, some of the tweets we publised: 

A highlight from Panel 1 - Industrial decarbonisation means "zero-emissions" says @TomasWyns at #LowCO2Conf - thanks for joining! pic.twitter.com/HUXlpzI4ft

— EU Metals (@Eurometaux) October 19, 2017

Mukund Bhagwat from @Aurubis calling on panellists to move on from #EUETS, and focus on decarbonising Europe's electricity system #LowCO2EU pic.twitter.com/PLY5NiaLir

— EU Metals (@Eurometaux) October 19, 2017

We must all believe in the future of industry in Europe, says @BKMauritzen @NorskHydro - talking #innovation at #LowCO2Conf pic.twitter.com/5vVd4at0Kl

— EU Metals (@Eurometaux) October 19, 2017

Key messages from @WorldBank Kirsten Hund at #LowCO2Conf!

Low-carbon economy = more metals, mostly from developing countries. pic.twitter.com/7C684mDWlB

— EU Metals (@Eurometaux) October 19, 2017

#LowCO2Conf starting now! Looking forward to a great debate on Europe's low-carbon transition. pic.twitter.com/vkm76j2YiO

— EU Metals (@Eurometaux) October 19, 2017

Support Syrian refugiees in Brussels

This is a video I did for the NGO #WeExist, a project aiming at creating  jobs for Syrian refugees. They cook and serve Syrian food every Monday. They approached me for a promotion video and I was really happy to help!   

Thumbs up for the Digital Single Market

A really interesting project I did for the CCIA regarding the review of the digital single market. It was great fun to put together all these short interviews and give them life with thumbs up and down. The video had a really excellent audience on Facebook and Linkedin because it was timely and the content was relevant! looking forward to do more videos in that style!

Video for WSBI

This a new project I am working on with the WSBI (representing the saving banks all over the world) where we will have have regular videos about the transformation of the banking sector all over the world. It was a lots of preparation from both sides but the filming went very very smoothly. We used a prompter to ease the reading of the text and  3 lights to ensure a professional look. Looking forward to shoot episode 2.

WSBI Exchange, episode #1, May 2017 talks about new data from WSBI that shows how innovation is leading the way in addressing financial inclusion.

Thinking about clean energy

Google Brussels hired me to cover an event they organised about clean energy. Strange at first to think that Google has something to do with energy... but in fact, I understood that clean energy is super high tech (even renewables) and when there is tech, of course there is Google :-) 

Great fun working is such a relaxed atmosphere and film about really interesting topics. 

Study Visit to the Silicon Valley of Members of the European Parliament

With more than 20 visits in 4 days, it was a marathon the MEPs have been running in the Silicon Valley but is was worth to understand what makes that place so special! Below in the highlight clip I produced, and here the other videos including a daily blog. 

This summer a delegation of 15 Members of the European Parliament* went on a tour of Silicon Valley (18-21/07/16) organised by the European Internet Forum (EIF) and EU40 under the title 'ICT Innovation & Entrepreneurship: the Road to the Valley'. In this video MEPs share the key learning points they are bringing back to Europe.

Workshop on sexual health in humanitarian emergencies

A very interesting workshop with a lot of very intense content! The challenge was to summarise all the excellent testimonials into a video that could be seen by people that could not attend the workshop. Judging by the number of views on the original video, it seems we reach that goal and further :-)

'Sex does not stop in humanitarian emergencies! In fact, it is when people have lost everything that they turn to one another'. This EuroNGOs workshop on advocacy for Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in humanitarian response is a great experience sharing about the challenges arising from humanitarian crisis.

Revolution on wheels

Great filming this event about automated cars... and of course I had a chance to enter the back of the car and then it started driving automatically :-) 

Match Making of Innovative Businesses

Great filming for the Vanguard Initiative and asking participants of the match making event why they came to the event ... in ONE word? Answers are really diverse and reflects well the energy of the day!  

Short videos like that are a great way to give a flavour of an event and show the diversity of the participants.

On February the 25th 2016 the Vanguard Initiative hosted a match-making event where over 400 participants, company-representatives and industrial experts, met to discuss industrial challenges and how to solve them through cooperation in Vanguard Initiative pilot projects. The event was made possible by a grant from the European Commission.

More and more 360 pics

360 pictures are really cool and are giving a new perspective on things. I have been experimenting some in some meeting rooms and at a gala diner. Very happy about the result. 

Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Filming at the innovation Summit - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA