How we earned the work.
Big Picture Conferences hired us after seeing our work at another of their events, the Canadian Hotel Investment Conference, where we were covering one of the sponsors.
We first worked with the Big Picture team a couple of years earlier, at a conference they later acquired. When we reached out, their sponsorship team told us they had coverage handled. Two weeks before this event, their marketing team got in touch to ask what we could do.
Their goal was to build the conference's brand: more content, in less time, at a higher standard than before.
Our approach.
We covered the whole conference with a crew of two, driving from Toronto to Montreal with all our equipment.
Bilingual from start to finish. The conference ran in French, with headphones for English-speaking attendees. Our founder speaks French, so he conducted every interview and edited all the French-language content himself. Nothing was lost in translation, and the client didn't need a separate French-speaking crew.
A full-circle hire. Our second shooter was the person who first taught our founder to shoot video. This was the first time we were able to hire them, and it made the project personal.
What we delivered.
The client had content to post while the conference was still running, and a finished recap video the next morning.
- During the eventAbout 50 phone clips, texted to the client in real time for their LinkedIn
- Next dayFirst recap video and stage photos
- Two days afterEvent and booth photos, about 500 in total
- One week afterTwo more recap videos and eight full interviews
The full interviews give Big Picture an archive to draw on for future marketing, long after this year's conference.
The challenge: a new venue in a new city.
The hardest part wasn't the shooting. It was the logistics we take for granted at home.
We've worked Toronto's conference venues so often that loading in is second nature. In Montreal, the basics suddenly took effort: finding the right entrance, where to park, and where to set up our gear, all in a second language.
Our fix was simple: arrive very early. You can't plan for every unknown in an unfamiliar venue, but you can build in time to solve problems before the first session starts. It's now a standard part of how we plan every out-of-town event.
The results.
The real-time clips went straight onto Big Picture's LinkedIn during the conference, and the first recap video followed the next day.
Before this conference, Big Picture had booked us for only part of their annual portfolio. Once the project wrapped, they told us they wanted to look at adding their other events too.
“Client quote goes here: one or two sentences from the Big Picture team about the experience.”Name, title, Big Picture Conferences
