What have Emma Thompson, Clare Balding OBE, Anna Watkins MBE and Flutterby Films got in common? We’ve all been to Newnham College Cambridge, and proud of it.
Way back Newnham started planning their own TEDx talk to celebrate the talents and experiences of Newnhamites, putting together an inspirational programme to be live streamed and then archived as an online resource.
We met up with Penny Hubbard and her colleagues and planning began. Following a recce we put together a five person crew, with everyone doubling up on duties to keep within budget. Everything was set for Feb 17th 2018, the big day.
Technically there is quite a lot to staging a TEDx. On location we had live PA sound for multiple speakers and musicians, three camera channels, lighting, and video playback.
All this needed to be mixed and live streamed online, there are a lot of parts which need to work together. We had a great team, which made all the difference on the day.
One of our trickiest challenges was marrying our all-digital set up with the colleges analogue projection system. We had to source a ‘Kramer Scaler’ (a thing I’d never heard of) to get the two to talk and this in turn introduced a delay to the video projections in the room. John Avery our soundy deserves a special mention for using a clever software fix to bring sound and picture back together.
The live event and live stream went really well and we are now in the process of editing and re-packaging the separate talks for the Newnham website, and potentially for inclusion in the TED archive. Once they’re up we’ll post some on our Events page.
Talks on home schooling, climate change, and satellites were broken up with on-the-spot song writing, conducting a string ensemble and selection of short films.
This is the first TEDx we’ve done and we learnt a lot! This kind of event can seem daunting, but with careful planning it can really deliver. If you have an event you wish to stream or just film, let us know, we can help.