World Retail Connected

This year’s event should have been taking place in Rome in April, but six months before the event was due to take place, the venue needed to change because of restrictions brought about by the global pandemic. The client needed to make a decision as to whether cancel or postpone, having worked closely with the organisers over five years we knew that they would be keen not to cancel, therefore we suggested running this as a Virtual Event through our Live Streaming department. We assured the client that we would apply the same production values to a virtual event as we would a live version. They gave us the green light and we were tasked with producing the entire event. The event took place in London, 15th-17th September.

The three-day event was created and streamed from our Live Studio at St. Ermin’s Hotel in London, using a dedicated virtual online platform designed and built for the event, this enabled us to transform the virtual event into a real live experience. It brought a true sense of reality to a virtual event. Attendees arrived at the virtual reception and entered to view event schedules, speaker profiles and content streams.

We wanted to match the glamour and luxury of the venue in Rome, so having our studio in St. Ermin’s Hotel allowed speakers to be filmed and clients to attend in a safe and inspiring event venue.To create this event involved the following:

Design

Creation of a 2D virtual stage set and studio set ups for virtual elements.
Web design and build for event and web portal for live streaming.

Animation

3D designs along with animated special effects onto 3D design animation.

Streaming

Hosting a dedicated player that was responsible for streaming all live content. We also hosted multiple channels of on-demand content.

Remote filming

This technique enabled us to split in up to nine remote presenters at any given time, all having their own dedicated video and audio feeds.

Studio filming

We recorded the following in the 8m x3m green studio we had set up in St. Ermin’s Hotel: keynote presentations and panel sessions.

Everything was keyed in and overlaid into our virtual set designs, we created animations including light effects, motion effects and lower 1/3 title indent designs and after affects. Our internal team designed, filmed, edited, stage managed and streamed all elements.