GOING DIGITAL

WITH VIRTUAL EVENTS NOW A VITAL PART OF THE INDUSTRY, TPMEA CHECKS IN WITH TWO COMPANIES THAT ARE EMBRACING THE CHANGE AND ADAPTING TO THIS BOLD, NEW ONLINE WORLD.

3MONKEYS

CO-FOUNDER, RUDI BUCHNER SHARES THE LATEST GOINGS ON FROM INSIDE THE IMPRESSIVE 3MONKEYS VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE.

Making the best of what has been a horrendous time for most of the industry, 3Monkeys has used the enforced downtime from live events to scale up its virtual events offering dramatically. “We have been producing exclusively online events for around six months now,” began Co-Founder, Rudi Buchner. “We’ve now ran more than 100 rehearsal and show days. It’s an exciting time.”

From humble beginnings with two flight cases set up in its workshop, 3Monkeys’ virtual events offering has grown into a proper broadcast-style control room in the company’s facility in Silicon Oasis. “We recently added three sub controls, giving us the possibility to broadcast events in parallel or combine all the control rooms into one big infrastructure, giving us a total of 35 remote channels for video conferencing clients and up to four dedicated feeds for external studios,” Buchner revealed. “A fourth production rack has also been integrated into the virtual event studio of a partner agency in San Francisco, extending our footprint and allowing us to interlink productions from North America and the EMEA region.”

According to Buchner, the rapid evolution of the world of virtual events has meant that it was vital to invest in the appropriate infrastructure. “Like with physical events, each virtual event is a living creature of its own and has different requirements. Clients have shown an immense learning curve, resulting in new, exciting virtual event concepts, designs, and approaches – each approach possibly asking for a bigger, better, more sophisticated or radically new solution,” he commented. Buchner recalled one example where

a client needed 144 remote feeds, which had to go live in pre-defined groups within a 20-minute segment of the event. “Our first thought: impossible!” he laughed.

“We also had a client ask for simultaneous translation into eight languages; and even one who asked about linking green screen studios in different parts of the US with one central location and bi-directional lines between all of them, including a handover between studios to cover Asia out of Dubai, resulting in an almost 24-hour conference broadcast.”

While all these queries provided a challenge, Buchner was pleased to report that they were all solved in the end. “We came up with solutions partly out of our own resources, but also partly with the support of local AV suppliers,” he stated. “Let’s face it, despite many people believing they can run virtual events from one laptop, a professionally organised and executed event needs a lot of gear, expertise and manpower.”

Buchner reserved special praise for DLC Events and eclipse – both companies that have become integral to the 3Monkeys virtual events operation. “We have been relying heavily on our partners out of the AV rental industry in UAE when it comes to manpower, hardware and, last but not least, their expertise to get things right in areas where we lacked experience,” he shared. “Having DLC as partner for simultaneous translation as well as remote simultaneous translation enabled us to have multilingual broadcasts and they added voice recording and live VOG capabilities to our facility. On the other hand, eclipse is an integral part of our green screen studio and is pretty much running it.”

One of the most satisfying aspects of the work for Buchner is how it proves the value of Dubai’s events sector. “The expertise and knowledge in the local market to produce and manage virtual events on the highest level exists – there’s no need to go abroad,” he commented. “We are proud that our solution is now used in the US, giving our hashtag, #FomDubaiToTheWorld an entirely new layer.”

Dubbed by Buchner as “the most underestimated topic in our region”, IT is something that he believes is vital to the success of a virtual event. “Big agencies and organisations have a health and safety officer on board for their productions. In the same way, we believe it’s necessary to establish the presence of a well-versed IT infrastructure, compliance, and security officer,” he stated. “If you are planning a virtual event, force the supplier of your choice to up their game and provide you with a detailed documentation of their IT proceedings. If you are a service provider, listen to the IT experts as there is a whole new universe and, once you start exploring it, it will work in your favour.”

Speculating on the future, Buchner believes that virtual events will continue to develop rapidly. “Not everything is entirely developed yet, and new challenges will arise from time to time, but in general a handful of ME-based players within the industry have adopted to the new event ecosystem very quickly and are capable of delivering virtual events that are on par with and beyond what is being delivered in this segment globally,” he commented. “It will be very interesting to see the further developments and to see the development of hybrid solutions as the next step.” Photos: 3Monkeys www.3monkeys.net

N&M DUBAI

NEUMANN&MÜLLER EVENT TECHNOLOGY’S SVEN SCHUSTER PROVIDES AN UPDATE ON THE COMPANY’S ONLINE EVENTS OFFERINGS.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has seen demand for in-person live events drop off to almost zero, the demand for online events has surged. “Virtual events is an area that we have really seen come to the fore,” commented Sven Schuster, Senior Project Manager at N&M Dubai. “We have always offered these services, but they were never our primary focus. The good thing for us is that the structure was already in place, because we have already offered online and hybrid events for years. They were used mainly as an add-on to our standard live events, so we just had to scale it up to cater to the increasing demand.”

Describing the increase in demand for virtual events as “massive”, Schuster commented: “Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we did mainly hybrid and standard live events; now, we see a shift of almost 90% to online events. We had to scale up the operation tremendously.”

A key component of N&M Dubai’s virtual events offering is the company’s ‘come2interact’ solution. “This is a tool that was developed by our colleagues in Germany,” Schuster explained. “It gives guests the ability to take part in Q&As or other interactive experiences through their own devices while at an event.” With this solution already in place, the N&M team simply had to work out how it could be utilised in an online world rather than at in-person events.

Prior to rolling out its enhanced online events offering, N&M conducted training across teams in both the UAE and Germany. “We did this so our teams could bring themselves up to date on the technical requirements,” Schuster commented. And while this was great for the team to brush up on the theory, according to Schuster, the only way to really test if a team is ready for the real thing is to give them some “proper hands-on experience”.

“We needed the team to be ready quickly right from the start, so we organised our own online events where they were the technicians, and I was the client,” he explained. “I came up with all kinds of strange requests and ideas to test them out, so they were ready for anything by the time the real events got started.”

After a flood of enquiries around the time that the pandemic struck, Schuster explained that, while the number of requests has now levelled out, the fact that most clients have now gathered some experience of online events has meant that nowadays requests are much more realistic, which makes the pitching and

quoting process much smoother. “Everyone is more experienced in online events now, and that includes our clients,” Schuster outlined. “Initially, a lot of requests aimed to simply do the exact same show they were going to do in a normal live event and transfer that into a virtual setting, which just doesn’t work. So, we had to do a lot of consultation in the beginning.”

So far, most online events have been operated from pop-up studios. “We try to set these up anywhere the client wants, as long as it is feasible and safe,” Schuster confirmed. However, the Senior Project Manager hinted that this might soon be about to change… “We have some interesting news coming in the next few weeks, so watch this space!”

Looking forward, Schuster believes that the effects of the pandemic will be felt for a long time to come. “Many people have realised that it’s not worth sitting on a plane for eight hours to attend a meeting or event for a day,” he posed. “Whether we like it or not, hybrid events are here to stay.”

However, for Schuster, nothing will beat the feeling of live, in-person events. “An online event is great to transmit information and it can even be entertaining for the audience,” he concluded. “But it will never give the audience goosebumps like when the bass guitar kicks in, a whole lighting rig illuminates a stage or a 50m LED screen flashes amazing content. You will never be able to transmit that feeling online.” Photos: N&M Dubai www.neumannmueller.com

N&M Dubai Senior Project Manager, Sven Schuster.

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