A number of the Speakeasy team have been enjoying the comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Lots of good acts. Just to give you an idea of what’s been out here here’s top 10 for the Dave comedy award for one liners. Congrats to Tim Vine for wining!
1) Tim Vine “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”
2) David Gibson “I’m currently dating a couple of anorexics. Two birds, one stone.”
3) Emo Philips “I picked up a hitch hiker. You’ve got to when you hit them.”
4) Jack Whitehall “I bought one of those anti-bullying wristbands when they first came out. I say ‘bought’, I actually stole it off a short, fat ginger kid.”
5) Gary Delaney “As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.”
6) John Bishop “Being an England supporter is like being the over-optimistic parents of the fat kid on sports day.”
7) Bo Burnham “What do you call a kid with no arms and an eyepatch? Names.”
8 ) Gary Delaney “Dave drowned. So at the funeral we got him a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt. Well, it’s what he would have wanted.”
9) Robert White “For Vanessa Feltz, life is like a box of chocolates: Empty.”
10) Gareth Richards “Wooden spoons are great. You can either use them to prepare food. Or, if you can’t be bothered with that, just write a number on one and walk into a pub…”
Well one of the big buzzes at the moment is User Generated Material (UGM) or maybe it’s CGM or possibly UCC but whatever acronym you know it as - the principal is the same. Getting the end user to generate some kind of media content.
Not essentially a new idea (’Letters to the editor’ in that old fashioned newspaper world for example) but now being utilised in a very hi-tech way, where corporate and public sector organisations can get their users to create useful and interesting content about their company.
So how can this work in practise. Well recently a Scottish pop singer asked her fans to make a pop video for her. She posted the track online and got inundated with ‘unique’ video promo versions of her song. However in a more practical sense companies can enhance their employeed engagement programs through using UGC with their staff.
Our latest example of this was at an awards ceremony for Co-operative Financial Services. We were providing the backbone logistics for the event and also supplied the on-screen content. As part of this we suggested getting entrants to film a one minute piece shot and edited on the camera. This was then sent back to our in-house edit suites where we added a bit of gloss and made them ready for the ceremony. We facilitated all of this by sending out 50 low cost HD easy shoot cameras along with instructions and mentoring on how to go about it. The resulting videos were surprising and genuinely engaging.
There are a number of benefits to this approach. It extended the feel good factor of the awards by getting the staff really involved early on and everyone seemed to have a great time making the videos. On the night, well lets just say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and the feedback from the event suggested it was one of the best ever.
So, ‘user generated media’, no matter what it’s called can really add to your armoury of communication tools.
Give one of our producers a call to find out more.
Magnus Wake - Head of Post Production and UGM mentor extraordinaire
Last week Germany experienced some of the worst flooding in 30 years, but that didn’t put me off attending the international IMEX conference, the event you must attend if you don’t want to be left standing at the sidelines of the event industry. The annual meetings industry exhibitors event this year was attended by a record number of well over 2800 hosted buyers from more than 60 markets, and had a visitor total of nearly 9000 people.
Every year I do my best to go to IMEX, which allows me to meet industry partners and try out cutting edge developments in technology and global trends within the events and meetings industry. This year Corinthia Hotels hosted my trip to IMEX, where Corinthia were proudly showcasing their new 5 star London Hotel (which just so happens is around the corner from the new Speakeasy offices in Covent Garden!) The Corinthia Hotel Group and the Intercontinental Hotel Group in Frankfurt were excellent hosts, and the service was second to none.
Lots of views were discussed at the three-day event. The big topic on everybody’s lips was the recent volcanic ash cloud. The ash from the Eyjafjallajoekull eruption affected everybody to some degree, and the snowball effect it has had on the events industry, in particular how we have all been forced to rethink our concepts, strategies, costs and processes, produced some very interesting discussions.
Healthcare remained as the primary industry sector, with an increase in business in the corporate, science and engineering sectors, but interestingly government commissioning of events decreased this year.
At IMEX I got to discuss burgeoning trends with industry colleagues who all have something to bring to the table. One of the trends that has become apparent is that customers are now expecting greater transparency through procurement processes. Green concerns also continue to grow, with issues of sustainability in the event industry on everybody’s minds.
Like every year, I enjoyed meeting fellow colleagues, networking and exchanging ideas, meeting new people, reconnecting with industry colleagues and networking with the best global suppliers. Perhaps the most important part of attending IMEX is listening to the concerns of the event industry as a whole. This year there seems to be a greater sensitivity towards costs, a greater pressure to justify our actions and a greater demand on ROI.
There was a fantastic atmosphere at this year’s show, with exhibitors attending from all over the world. I am already looking forward to next year!
As I sit in the sanctuary of my garden back home in Surrey I am chuckling to myself at the memories of yesterdays annual company BBQ. When the alarm went off at 4am on Friday and I wondered what the day ahead had in store for me, I don’t think I could have predicted what was to occur at my first Speakeasy BBQ.
After touching down in Edinburgh, we were met by the lovely Dave who took us on a wee tour of interesting places such as Ann Street on the way to collecting Magnus. With the Speakeasy bus full we motored onto Stanley as we debated the intellectual issues such as Michael Jacksons passing, collaborations of the Speakeasy/ Orchard names (suggestions included Sporchard/ Orcheasy) and whether you can say dove instead of dived – it turns out both are acceptable in case you were concerned!
After a morning of work and Alex having his head shaved, two o’ clock arrived and shouts of, ‘The foods ready!’ echoed through Wildwood House and caused a stampede in the halls to get to the garden.
The food was brilliant; my fillet steak melted in the mouth and the potato salad was immense (thank you for sharing the recipe Jim!)
Just as we were tucking into the food it started to ‘spit’ and then it really started to come down quite heavily. Some quick thinking people grabbed umbrellas or whatever they could (I seem to remember Dave using a tray!) and we persevered with sitting in the garden, Martine and I particularly did not want to be thought of as soft Southerners. We did however have to concede defeat when our clothes were soaked through and the risk of pneumonia presented itself.
Now with some people, rain would mean the end of the fun but not at Speakeasy! In every room activities were going on such as Magnus and Mark McKenna’s ‘master class’ on the Thriller dance moves in an edit suite (I have some funny footage of this), Murray Vs Roddick playing in the board room and for the braver few bobbing for beer bottles in the garden!
When our taxi arrived to take us back to the airport it was sad to leave you all whilst the fun was continuing but we are already looking forward to the Christmas Party! Special thanks must go to Shona for the organisation, Jim for cooking and the use of the garden, Alex and Dave for varnishing the new furniture that our attendance required and Stuarts’ wife for the delicious cupcakes!
It’s not often that a Speakeasy editor ventures outside our smart-glass snuggery. Mainly due to our invariable social skills, allergy to daylight and continuous access to coffee (sometimes cake!). But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and that can sometimes mean an onsite edit. Que the ‘It’s not my turn’ argument and the game of ’shortest straw’.
Not this time though!!!
Our amazing events team were tasked with the erm task of managing the Pioneers09 event for the Engineering and Physical Science Research Programme (EPSRC). A gathering of some of the greatest minds modern science has to offer showcasing their newest inventions and innovative research programmes.
As a (closet) geek I jumped at the chance to go after having a nosey at the exhibition designs and seeing a list of cream of the crop attending; how could I pass up the chance to meet a real life roller-coaster designer or a guy who designs sophisticated heat beams which we call “lasers”?? (You know, I have one simple request and that is to have sharks with laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently, my cycloptic friend informed me that that could not be done but what’s that got to do with the price of cheese?)
My mission, which I chose to accept, was to edit a 2-3 minute highlight of the event using our magical portable edit suite ready to be uploaded onto the EPSRC youtube channel the following day. Our setup was 3 Sony PDW-700’s. Two were based in a lecture theatre, each recording and running a feed onto two huge screens which in turn was being recorded to an HD1500 deck. We also had one roaming crew interviewing all the important peeps including Richard Noble talking about this years plans to break the current land speed record and Brendan Walker talking about designing a new generation of rollercoasters and wearing, quite possibly, the coolest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen.
I learned about wave power, nuclear power (are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?), saw how my bones moved on a skeleton on a bike, threw a guy off a bucking bronco (for experimental reasons only), saw an ambulance with an ejector seat, a machine that can burn hearts inside your chest and a smart car with a tv inside the back! It may not have looked like much, but it had it where it counts, kid. They made a lot of special modifications themselves. Time circuits on. Flux Capacitor… fluxxing. Engine running. All right!
Speakeasy peeps onsite were Kathryn, Mark, Alex and Graham who made sure the event ran as funkily as possible and kept me going with tapes, food, coffee and the laughs. My highlights were getting to wear a radio headset and look like a rock star, the gazebo man in the pink dressing gown, the cow called Maggie on the wall of the restaurant, the aluminous men outside the shop, the ‘rmember when you couldn’t google on your mobile phone’ chat, Pizza Express, a lunchtime adventure and the final edit of the video which really showed what the event was all about! Well done to everyone involved especially the events team for producing a cracking event and Jenni for the voiles which everyone was desperate to keep at the end of the day.
Magnus Wake one of our Directors and our Head of Post-Production discusses the merits of a total digital work flow for video production and delivery:
Magnus Wake:
“When you are looking after post-production for any production company, you’d have thought the most important element would be the edit suites – but actually it starts before then.It starts at the acquisition stage when you’re getting your footage.So the two things we look at is the quality of the footage, make sure it’s high enough quality, and actually whether or not we’ve got an archive process for that material.
In the past, you’d shoot something on tape, the tape was seen as broadcast quality, and it would go into your edit suites and be mastered and you’d have the camera tapes at the end of the process and you’d also have the master tape of the new program.So everything was very straight forward.
Nowadays, with digital acquisition, you’re shooting onto memory sticks, which then go into an edit suite and get copied off onto a hard disk.And then that memory stick will go back out and get re-used.And so you’ve got a real concern about the archive stage.
When it comes to quality, we’re only now just at the stage where you can shoot HD quality on memory sticks and on DVD-like disks, such as XDCAM.So we’re now shooting the way we want to shoot, but we’ve still got this issue with archive.You never know when a client’s going to turn round and say “You know that shot you got for me a year and a half ago?We’re going to need to use that now”.So we now, make sure that we archive all that material.
Everything that comes in has a process, we’ve got a way of moving it from the edit suite, on to a tape back up drive, which keeps it all digital – there’s not going to be any degradation in quality – and then we put that into storage as well.So now we’ve got all the components we need, as in the past, you didn’t.
The reason that we shoot digitally comes down to quality, and speed.Edits can be processed faster, editors can work quicker with the digital media.And lastly it’s an all digital workflow – it’s a very flexible workflow.So we can capture and record electronically, we then go into the digital domain in the edit suite as well.
And at the end of that we are publishing online, to YouTube, or any one of another hundred ways of different digital methods of publishing and it just works all together – it works really well.”
