Geneva Summit Pre-Recorded Event

June 8th, 2021

Overview

Event type: Virtual

Event platform: Website

Workflow: Pre-record > Website

In the making: 5 months

Date of event: 07.06.21 > 08.06.21

Duration: 2 hours per day

Company: Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy

Speakers: 15

The Project

In January 2021, The Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy approached London Filmed and asked for help in facilitating the transition of their annual conference over to the digital stage. 

The conference aims to bring together human rights activists from around the world to share stories, and plan action strategies. The event was hosted by Hillel Neuer and featured Human rights heroes, activists, and former political prisoners from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, and other countries.

Filmed across six locations around the globe, the summit needed a huge amount of organisation and project management to ensure consistency of style and quality. Because of COVID and other restrictions, many speakers were unable to travel to pre-record their content for the summit, so we reached out to our global network to source production companies that could help. We used studios in the UK, US, Germany, New York, Belarus, and Israel. For the remote panel in Washington, we brought in Nathan Law from London and Can Dündar from Germany. In order to make sure all the lighting, camera settings, and style were consistent across the studios, we created a detailed set of shooting guidelines and briefed each production company thoroughly before the shoot day. 

The pre-recorded event content – opening film:

Challenges

• Creating an opening film that captured the tone, feel, and gravitas of the event
• Filming in six locations across the world
• Pre-recording a panel discussion using speakers from across the world in three different studios.
• Handling sensitive and emotive topics respectfully, while ensuring a voice was given to the voiceless and the powerful messages of the speakers were amplified.

Solutions

• We dedicated time to really understand and learn the stories of the activists. We spoke at length with some of the team at  The Geneva Summit to gain insight into how we could best empower the speakers at the event
• External project management tools allowed us to effectively manage multiple parties around the world with open communication and transparent workflows
• A dedicated team of five made up of a Project Manager, Animator, Creative Director, Lead Editor and Head of Production
• We utilised our wide-ranging production network to draw on expertise based in Washington, Berlin, New York, Belarus, Israel, and London
• Used remote filming to capture activists in Australia and Cuba

Result

“London Filmed delivered a slick, pre-recorded virtual conference that went off without a hitch and helped give a voice to some of the most important issues affecting the world today.”
Tom Mahon, Co-Founder London Filmed