Taking advantage of in-person conferences to produce killer video content
2020 called, they want their virtual conference back! We at Five Five Collective are relieved to see that so many professional organizations are back to putting on in-person events to meet, network, and share knowledge. Not only does this give their members the opportunity to make lasting, meaningful connections, it opens the door to producing high quality—and surprisingly economical—testimonial video content.
Open your mouth and say AAA
A happy member of AAA sits in our conference room studio
To illustrate the point, let’s take a look at one of our favorite projects we’ve recently produced: a series of human interest, recruitment, and promo videos for the American Association for Anatomy (or “AAA”) that celebrate their inspiring family of anatomists to drive enrollment. AAA’s members hail from all over the world, and work in anatomy-related fields like developmental biology, neuroscience, and regenerative medicine. These are highly skilled scientists who have stories to tell—and are totally worth meeting in person!
We took advantage of AAA’s 2022 conference to collect unscripted interviews from as many members as we could. We spent two days talking to anatomists from Florida, Canada, Nigeria, and more about their work, the conference, and why they joined the Association. With our portable cinema gear package, we transformed a private conference room into a fully featured film studio, complete with lights, backdrop, and makeup station.
A World of Stories
Getting ready to record an interview
Recording all these conversations in cinema-quality 4K would have been a huge lift if we had to travel all over the world to do it. (And recording everyone over Zoom wouldn’t have done the stories justice.) Luckily, the conference did the work for us, by bringing everyone to Philadelphia for a weekend! We ended up with a dozen fascinating 30-minute interviews, and a variety of footage from the conference itself, which we edited into a 2.5 minute membership drive video, and a 60-second promo video to get members excited about 2023’s conference in Washington, DC.
On top of that, we worked with AAA to select five interviews to develop into individual member highlight videos, each about 90 seconds long. We partnered with talented film crews in Missouri, Indiana, Louisiana, Iowa, and Florida to capture cinematic B-roll footage of our selected Association members at work in their labs, at home, and interacting with students.
Strength in Numbers
Cinematographer Simone Holland captures B-Roll footage of the conference
The end result was seven finished videos that the American Association for Anatomy could use to celebrate their members, drive enrollment, and build excitement for the upcoming meeting, all thanks to strategically planned in-person video production during their yearly conference in Philadelphia.
Does your organization have an upcoming conference in Philadelphia, or elsewhere in the country? Book a meeting with us to learn more about how you can take advantage of this opportunity to create testimonial, human interest, recruitment, and promotional video content that doesn’t break the bank.