/ OBJECTIVES
To provide full-service production support and AV infrastructure for our client’s long-established and world leading medical symposium.
To create three theatres, to enable speakers to easily present their content and participate in discussion and debate. This to be fully hybrid, with every session live streamed, and incorporating many remote presenters. The hybrid nature to extend to live streamed surgery via a specialist two-way link to a hospital in Germany.
The global nature of the event was key, and both the remote and in-person experiences needed to be carefully considered.
A jam-packed agenda consisting of over 400 presentations across a 3 day program, combined with the fact that we were to expect less than 30% of the content before arriving onsite, required a water-tight system for the processing of all presentation files. This included integrity checks, on site presenter checks and instant distribution to the plenary AV teams.
/ CHALLENGES
The program consisted of back-to-back sessions from 8am until 6pm across the three auditoria for three days. With this number of presenters, and such a tight schedule, there was no room for error, and had to run with military precision.
As a brand new client and relationship, we had to very quickly understand the 45 year history of the event and ensure we were providing all the necessary solutions, as well as enhancing the overall audience and presenter experience over previous years.
/ SOLUTION
The event was held at the Hilton London Metropole, utilising virtually all the space available. This provided the space we needed not only for the three auditoria, but also for all the ‘behind the scenes’ requirements, such as full production offices, streaming control centres, edit suites, speaker ready room, and even a filming studio for the client’s video team. We had a strong team of 66 expert crew ensuring that everything went off without a hitch.
The entire set up was flexible enough to incorporate changes on the fly due to the live surgery shifting time with little notice, and keep the rest of the show running like clockwork. Contributing to the smooth timekeeping was the Vive Stage Management Wizard, our app which allowed the event team to accurately set each presenters countdown timer. Any overrun was automatically tracked, and taken off the Q&A time for the presenter, to ensure that all sessions ran exactly to time.
The 2 main stages were kitted out with a custom fabricated 9-seater curved top table and 2 lecterns. The front of the top table and lecterns had built in LED screens to display the presenters’ names, which followed them as they moved from lectern to table. This was all controlled in real time, again via the Vive Stage Management Wizard, which the client event team operated with ease.
The lectern itself contained our Smart Presenter Platform, an intuitive touch-screen system allowing presenters to advance slides, draw over and highlight their slides on all screens (and live stream). It also relayed the all-important session timer, and any messages directly from the moderators or event team.
The Vive Stage Management Wizard also enabled the client event team to relay important messages directly to the anchors on stage, informing them of any presenter changes or updates to schedule as needed, seamlessly and without delay.
All 400+ presentations came through our speaker ready room, where our friendly team of experts allowed presenters to check their slides, helped with any required tweaks, and then prepared the presenters for their stage appearance. Likewise, the remote presenters were greeted in our virtual green room and prepped for their session by dedicated operators. We installed a custom fibre optic network throughout all event spaces which not only enabled instant file syncing and communication between the speaker ready room and AV teams in each auditorium, but also ensured each presentation was in the right place and played at the right time. All camera, video and audio feeds were distributed through our network, back to the live streaming control centre, where the streaming team mixed everything together for the remote audience.
The live stream was watched in over 50 countries and allowed viewers to submit questions straight to the top table, contributing to truly global nature of the event. All individual presentation recordings were edited by our team and uploaded for instant on demand access on the client platform, with our edit suite processing over 800 video exports across the 3 days.
/ RESULTS
I knew you would do a good job but you really have blown me away, not only in the epic on-site delivery but all of your ideas, help and guidance throughout the lead-up to the event. Please send my thanks to every single crew member as I know how hard everyone worked to pull this off and I am forever grateful. I could not be happier with how the event ran, and all feedback has been phenomenal!