Filming Training videos at a conference in Bonita Springs FL

When filming multiple breakout rooms in a convention, there is a lot that goes on prior to the first day of filming. Here we are going to discuss a real case scenario we went through last month.

We were asked to film at a convention in Bonita Springs Florida by ICU. We were there for a total of 5 days. The client requested that we recorded seminars for serval different keynote speakers throughout the event. Most of the days, we had a total of 6 cameras rolling at once. At the end of each day, we had to hand a hard drive with all the footage, organized by the room that the cameras were in, and what speakers were doing their presentation at the time (in chronological order).

Our journey started out by acquiring the necessary gear for the shoot. For a convention such as this, we needed to make sure that the cameras could record for long periods of time without interruption. We had multiple batteries for each camera; but also got the ac adapters that can be plugged into a wall outlet so we had constant power going to the camera. These cameras also had XLR inputs in order to plug in the audio coming from the room’s audio board. We also needed to have multiple memory cards and a tripod for each camera.

The video production crew drove 4 hours to the location and we met with our point of contact the night before the event to go over the plan for the week. Just for reference, we arrived on Sunday, started filming on Monday morning and left on Friday afternoon. We were showed where we had to set up the cameras and explained how the event was taking place and where and when we had to be throughout the event. Understand that a project of this scale doesn’t happen overnight. Months prior we had to plan out and coordinate the filming of the conference. Everything from the scheduling the right people for the job, making sure the cameras, memory cards and tripods we good to go and run over any type of troubleshooting that we could think of and be ready to solve it. We even took a day at the office to have everyone come in and learn about the cameras since none of us have ever used the cameras we were going to be using at the event.

The day of the conference in Florida we got up extra early to set up all the cameras to the corresponding rooms. We took steps to maximize team effectiveness and we all had walkie-talkies plugged into our ears as well as a text group for the team to communicate with each other if any problem or situation arose. We also sat up a text group with the local AV team in case something went wrong in the rooms, we could contact them without leaving the rooms. We had our SD cards numbered and even our cameras. The first two days we had all hands on deck. Everyone was in their rooms recording. We also had to monitor the audio when all the other AV personal were busy with other issuers (something we were not responsible for prior to starting filming but we had to help out with this).

This is why it’s important to hire a video production team to film your conferences or conventions. There’s a lot of things that come into play and it’s always good to have people that have worked in this field or similar scenarios.