IBM

CREDITS:

Client

Prod. Company

EXEC. PRODUCER

DIRECTOR/DP

CAM OP

...

POST

IBM

remedy

AUSTIN SIMMONS

JOSH SLIFFE

ALLEN BAKER

SETH KALKMAN

REMEDY

It’s not everyday that you have all of your top customers in one place. That’s the position IBM was in when they brought us in to produce a series of videos during one of their conferences.

For this project we first started with how many people we’d be filming. They weren’t exactly sure, but they thought it would be somewhere around 20. From there we talked about the location for the interviews. Because the conference had basically taken over every event space and hotel in downtown San Francisco, there wasn’t any room left in the conference rooms, ballrooms, or back closets. Another factor was wherever we filmed needed to be extremely close to where the attendees would be, as we had very little time with each. Because of all that, the folks at IBM could only offer us a single hotel room (which had bolted down furniture). It wasn’t big enough to really have room to light and barely enough room for cameras. So with that we started calling around and digging to find anywhere, anything, where we could film these interviews other than that room.

Luckily, we found an apartment/office building nearby that had a single room on the fourth floor that was an old black box theatre style setup. Only a short 3 minute walk for the attendees – it was perfect! We plotted out our lighting diagram, placed our rental orders, and showed up the day before the conference to get everything setup. From there it was all clockwork.

THE DETAILS

Sure enough, over the course of the next 2 days we’d sit down with about 20 folks and chat with them about the specific ways in which IBM’s tools change the way they do business. We had three cameras – one wide, one medium, and one close-up on a slider. We gave IBM a few options for the look of the set… from a two-tone re-enactment of a place of business, to having different colors associated with different verticals, to a single paper backdrop + studio look. They liked the latter, so we went with that. For post-production we went ahead and transcribed all of the interviews and let IBM highlight the parts they liked out of each, so as to make sure those made the edits. It really was a quick + smooth project that we enjoyed doing and we’re happy to say they were more than pleased with the result!