Promoting events

The Royal Academy of Engineering wanted to use its events to more effectively publicise its work promoting excellence in engineering for the benefit of society.

There are three main ways you can publicise an event using video: livestreaming; produce videos during the event itself, to share via social media; and produce a summary film or shorter videos for social media after the event. Happen has done all three for the Academy.

We live video streamed its Leadership in Innovation Fellowship (LIF) pitch days and produce short film interviews of the fellows for social media. LIF provides training and support for international engineers with commercial ideas which could contribute to the development of their home countries. Its pitch days are when they present these ideas to a panel of judges and their contemporaries.

Preproduction is crucial for live video streaming, to test equipment and the internet connection you’ll use to broadcast the event. After the live event was over, we subsequently revised the footage, adding chapter headings to make it easier to navigate for viewers.

We featured b-roll of the events in the short interview clips for social media, making them more visually interesting and allowing us to edit the interviews more tightly, as we had more opportunities to hide the cuts.

Fast turnaround

During the Academy’s Frontiers of Development symposium (which brought together engineers, doctors and scientists to find new ways to improve the wellbeing of children during the first 2,000 days of life) and Global Grand Challenges Summit (a trilaterial event organised with the US and Chinese national academies of engineering, we produced short video interviews for the academy’s Twitter account, which required a fast turnaround with an eye for detail.

Capturing the sense of the event

And during the Academy’s Enterprise Hub Spring Showcase, where the entrepreneurs it is supporting pitch their businesses to potential investors, we shot short video interviews for social media and a highlights film featured three entrepreneurs, the chair of the Academy Enterprise Committee, John Lazar, and Pippa Gawley of Zero Carbon Capital.

To capture a sense of the event, we filming people arriving, the drinks before the presentations, a snippet of each of the three entrepreneurs’ pitches, and the networking afterwards. As well as interviewing each of the interviewees in a quiet room, we also spoke to entrepreneurs at the end of the evening, to capture their reaction to the event.

We also cut five shorter, one-minute videos focusing on each of the interviewees.