Carbon Forward Hybrid Conference

The project

We’ve helped to produce the Carbon Forward conference – a leading global environmental markets conference – for several years now. This year we produced a hybrid set-up for the three-day Carbon Forward 2023 at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in West London.

A significant part of this project was building and managing the event platform, which served as a pivotal event component for both the in-person and virtual guests and the remote speakers who were dialling in from around the world.

As well as this, we live streamed the event content to the platform and edited the sessions for Carbon Forward’s use post-event.

Live streaming

Ahead of the event our Head of Production conducted a site visit to measure up and liaise with the in-house AV team to ensure all the feeds were appropriate for the live stream and checked and managed access.

We built the show in advance to ensure the client was happy with the running order, slides and presentation. We then did a full prep in our warehouse with all the kit rigged up and tested before packing it down and shipping it to the venue.

For the event we used two FX6 cameras for a multi-angle stream. All inputs were vision mixed with the Portable Production Unit and our Live Stream Engineer mixed the content and audio feeds over the course of the three days to bring the virtual attendees into the room.

The virtual speakers were managed by our Virtual Producer who ran one-to-one tech briefing sessions ahead of the event and another once they were in the green room to check the microphones, lighting and framing ahead of going live on the in-room broadcast and on the live stream in the event platform.

We had a full redundancy set up on hardware (two vMix systems, two streamers, two zoom ingest computers, and two network switchers), which was rigged and ready in order to have a short switchover in case of failure of any equipment.

Our team, which consisted of a Camera Operator, a Live Stream Engineer, a Project Manager, a Virtual Producer and a Production Assistant were all connected for instant communication using our ‘Wireless Partyline Comms System’ throughout the event.

Platform build & management

We used the event platform Hopin/Ring Central to host the event, including ticket purchasing, registration, and attendance for both online and in-person attendees.

The complex set-up required several workarounds to ensure the brief was fully met and a seamless process was created for the users. This included a detailed registration form, multiple ticket types, numerous timed discounts with rules for their application, the agenda, and speaker profiles, including headshots, titles and bios for the 95 speakers. We also set up exhibition booths for the sponsors to sign into and complete.

At the event, we used the Hopin platform to make announcements to signpost attendees to breaks, networking, sessions, etc. and utilised the Q&A and poll functionality.

There were 95 speakers in total, including remote speakers from around the world including the USA, New Zealand and Asia. We organised several technical checks and rehearsal sessions for the remote callers to drop into ahead of the event to ensure they were set up optimally to deliver their content.

Our graphic design team created several badge designs that were printed for the in-person attendees, which distinguished the ticket type purchased. We also designed lower thirds to be built into the live stream.

Post-production

After the event, our video editors edited the live stream content, cutting it into sessions for Carbon Forward to release via Vimeo for continued marketing.