Why you should always film your events

In-person events started back up again recently, and we can confirm that the ones Novus has been involved with were very well attended. It seems that businesspeople are relishing being out and about and mixing with others again.

There’s no denying that virtual events are somewhat easier to organise, but what they offer in simplicity and convenience they lack in engagement, when compared to the connections attendees feel when getting together in real life. The screen is a barrier in more than one sense.

Assuming that Covid remains how it is now, and that restrictions won’t become any stricter, companies and public bodies will no doubt be looking at the next year or two and planning their event calendar.

Venue? ✔

Catering? ✔

Access…car parking…speakers…invitations…event promotion? ✔

A million-and-one other things? Erm, ✔

The to-do list for an in-person event can be significant, particularly if it’s an all-day event with lots of attendees. The after-event element is often forgotten until, well, after the event.

‘Ooh, wouldn’t it have been good to have filmed it?’ ‘Did you get any photos, Bob?’ ‘I had no idea what was going on in that part of the venue; I was too busy checking people in.’ ‘I’d have loved to have come as an attendee and seen everything we’d planned first-hand.’ ‘We’re struggling to find content to use across our socials.’

We hear these things all the time. Yet the issues are easily solved if you have your event professionally filmed. It’s not a costly exercise, particularly when you understand the value of the footage and the return you’d enjoy.

Some savvy businesses and organisations do realise this before their event takes place and they subsequently get in touch with us. Others, however, only realise the opportunity they’ve missed when the dust has settled.

Don’t rely on your team to capture photos/video of the event—they’ll have a million other jobs to do. And a few minutes of shaky-hand recording on someone’s iPhone is not the quality you’d want to put out into the world anyway. You need the right equipment, the correct lighting (particularly in dark corners), and the technology to hear your speakers loud and clear. You also need dedicated people at the event to record it, whose only role is to show how fantastic the event went down on the day.

What you do with the footage is up to you, but the possibilities are endless. More than simply plonking the whole thing online, you can chop up and edit the film—for marketing purposes, as a showcase for what you do, as social media content, for training, whatever…and it will all be of professional quality. You can even extract still images from the video that you could use across your marketing literature. You could milk that cow for months on end and get a lot of value from the one-off cost of having the event/day recorded.

It only needs one thing to go wrong for event organisers to feel panic; some can completely lose their heads, compounded by all the stress they’ve felt during the build up to the day itself.

When we film an event, we don’t worry about anything other than capturing the very best angles.