Lights… Camera… Zoom!
Here we are in the middle of a pandemic and many of us are trying to navigate the world of virtual everything.
One of my favorite clients called one day with an idea. She wanted to continue her “live” panel discussions but she didn’t want her subjects to be inside one of 500 boxes on the screen. Was it possible to do a panel professionally produced via Zoom — good audio, good lighting, camera switching, etc.?
Her biggest ask? She didn’t want to have to worry about the technical aspect of any of this. My client is the talent in these productions — she has to make sure the content is good, the questions are thought provoking, her interviewees are comfortable. That’s enough to worry about and I knew we could put her at ease.
This took me back to my time in TV reporting. We used live trucks, satellite trucks and LiveVu to go “live.” Switching between cameras often meant having at least one more crew member.
This is the professional production shoot we set up so a client could “go live.”
One call to one of my former news photographers turned entrepreneur and tech genius and we were good to go. If you look at the picture, you’ll see it’s a professional production shoot. The three cameras and the switcher are connected to the client’s computer. We were using her Zoom account to send out the “signal” to the audience.
It was a huge success! She not only went “live” but she also has a professionally produced recording to send out to her members shot in 4K, the same high-resolution format TV stations use.
Lexicon Strategies Partner and former Emmy Award winning political reporter Lori Geary has spent decades in the media industry covering local, state and national campaigns along with state government.
Ms. Geary joined the reporting team of WSB-TV in 1997 while anchoring at CNN Headline News. She stays active in the broadcasting world as a panelist for WAGA’s “The Georgia Gang” and Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Political Rewind.” Her expertise is now in media training, media strategy, corporate communications, crisis communications and storytelling.