On 24th September 2018, Informed Solutions were presented with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the category of Innovation.
Informed Solutions chose Reedsmore to produce a finished video of the day’s events. With well over 10,000 hours of live broadcast experience in a variety of roles, Reedsmore’s senior consultant Rob Taylor was a perfectly placed to manage the production.
As you might expect, Informed Solutions were delighted to accept this prestigious award and wanted to ensure that the event was captured on video for posterity and promotional purposes. This was to be a one-time only event that could neither be rehearsed nor repeated, so it was crucial that everything went without a hitch, both on the day and throughout post-production.
The Queen’s representative in Greater Manchester, the Lord Lieutenant Warren Smith, attended Informed Solutions’ Altrincham headquarters to present the award, along with a certificate signed by Her Majesty, to Informed Solutions’ founder and group CEO Elizabeth Vega and the UK CEO Seth Finegan.
Production
A week before the event, we conducted a thorough recce to plan the shoot. On the day of the presentation we brought in and set up panel lights, radio mics and three cameras, two of which were manned and the third locked off on the balcony above the reception area, where the presentation was to take place.
To minimise echo and background noise, each of the key people in the presentation were given radio mics. Ambient sound was recorded separately.
Immediately following the shoot, two backup copies were made of the original files to eliminate any risk of any irreplaceable footage being lost. An initial rough cut was made and presented to the client for approval.
Once feedback had been received and the initial cut had been approved with changes, we selected an appropriate music track which we cut to length to complement the duration of the visuals. We then mixed and processed the sound, colour graded the video and created animated graphics using the client’s brand assets, resulting in a seamless integration with the client’s existing promotional materials.
Promotion vs Posterity
From a production point of view, we were presented with a dilemma: We and the client wanted to capture all of the speeches for posterity, but this left the finished video at nearly seven minutes long, rather longer than an external audience would be likely to watch fully.
To solve this we created a second, abridged video from the first finished cut, removing most of the speech and leaving one salient point made by Elizabeth Vega. This cut the running time to under two minutes, far more comfortable for promotional use and without losing any of the longer version’s emotional impact.
The short version (above) was used primarily for external, promotional use. The full version can be seen below.