The Road to Hybrid Events
When I was a teenager decided what I wanted to study after secondary school, my Dad often told me I had to go into computers. ‘Computers’ if a very general catch-all nowadays, but he seemed to understand that the future was digital. And since I was a ‘techy’ child that I’d be a fool not to capatalise on that.
He was probably right, but all I wanted was to be part of the art world. And somehow strangely over the years those two things, call them hobbies or passions, merged into something new. Even before Covid, I loved tinkering around with new tech, trying to find the most efficient way to integrate and automate systems for Camberwell Arts (the answer is Zapier btw). But once lockdown happened I had to go a bit deeper and started on the journey to hybrid events. I preface all of this by saying I’m still no expert - but hopefully someday I will be. I love this stuff and now that the world is going hybrid, I really hope there will be a lot more opportunities to play with the newest kit to work a technical magic.
My first foray into digital events was for Camberwell Arts 2020, which I blogged about at the time. That was the dark-days of Zoom bombing and getting kicked off YouTube constantly because all my test streams looked like I was trying to market chain-smoking to the masses. We did have some wins though - I got my head around OBS, a very nifty (and free) open source software loved by Twitch & YouTube streamers. Once I stopped smoking on camera, I learnt my way around the back-end of YouTube Studio and once the panic subsided figured out how to multi-platform stream via Restream. I was very much living on digital duct-tape and prayers and more than once got a text mid-stream saying ‘is there supposed to be sound on this’.
A little after CAF20 finished, Royal Museums Greenwich called me and asked me to come back off furlough. We weren’t ready to welcome our supporters back onsite for events yet, so I got the chance to test out my new tech know-how on the museum. Luckily they introduced me to Webinars, which was a much smoother ride than I was used to - and over the course of a few months worth of digital Patrons and Members events I became comfortable running weekly panels from my sitting room. Less fun, was the captioning, which at the time I managed myself through Zubtitle, which has the fun added extra layer of cutting videos into 20 min chunks and then tying them back together on the clunky Windows Movie Maker app. Nearer the end of my time at Greenwich I got to work alongside some fantastic filmmakers, particularly WolfPack productions, to produce dedicated supporter video content and turned my hand (slightly) to Premier Pro for more sophisticated edits. [word to the wise, do not run Premier Pro on a computer from 2010 with no GPU!] Right at the end of my tenure, I worked with SLX to produce a live-stream of the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards 2020, which was a mix of pre-recorded and live content streamed from the Great Equatorial Telescope. That event in particular really lit a fire under me, to see the quality you could produce with the right kit (and expertise of course).
In April 2021 I moved to the Paul Mellon Centre, for what I thought at the time would be an easy-ride events wise. Their online programme up until that point had been exclusively Zoom webinars, plus I was delighted to discover that I’d have a right-hand woman in Events Assistant, Dani Convey sitting alongside me for every event. But it seems they had other ideas, and very soon the craic began again.
Events Assistant Dani Convey monitoring 4 Zoom feeds
The first big adventure was London, Asia, Art, Worlds - a multi-day digital conference in May 2021. One of our commissioned artists, Mithu Sen, wanted to disrupt the typical academic conferencing format. Together we devised a way for me to ‘Zoom-bomb’ my own events from a secondary account at precinct moments to provide additional commentary on the proceedings. Another LAAW trial was using Airmeet as an online visual events space to facilitate a cabaret performance of Spell by Sam Reynolds, followed by digital ‘cocktail hour’ to discuss the conference amongst colleagues.
The turning point was an event at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge in November 2021. The PMC were co-hosting an event on Maud Sulter, with The Women’s Art Collection (formerly New Hall Art Collection), around an exhibition of her work they were holding called The Centre of the Frame. We teamed up with the in-house AV team alongside an external tech company called TC Digital headed by Tim Cooper, who used to run AV at the College. The was the first proper live-stream for the Centre post-covid and we ran the feed on two Facebook channels and Youtube. Working with the TC Digital team, I was introduced to a new level of production and spent most of the day fawning over their kit. Once the PMC team saw what was possible with a moveable kit set-up, we started discussing what we might manage to do from the Centre itself for 2022.
A few weeks later, in Jan 22, we collaborated with MK Gallery on a one-day conference on Laura Knight. Peeking behind the massive auditorium curtain, I could see Technical Manager Luke Perry’s hive-mind kit with at least six screens on the go! A few of our speakers couldn’t make it to the venue last minute, which I thought would be a bit of a disaster. But Luke assured me it would be fine, and when the time came I was a intriguied (and perplexed) on how he managed to facilitate a conversation from the in-room mics and the speaker on Zoom all whilst showing on the auditorium screen and the Zoom stream. This I came to realise was the meaning of ‘full hybrid’, where the both the presenters and the audience were a mix of in-person and online. (Spoilers for the end - but this took me another 6 months to figure out)
Shortly after the conference I called up Tim Cooper, who ran the tech at Cambridge and arranged a site visit at PMC to talk about our ambitions and check out the building. Whilst he put together a kit-list and a plan I embarked on a Spring of experimentation with event’s live-streaming at the PMC, with a series of (gradually reducing) level of calamity. My first attempt was a lecture by Matthew Craske on his recent book Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness. Matthew (and our online guests) were very gracious as I fought the HDMI connection to the projector, switched video feeds to a laptop web-cam on a stool and snuck behind the panel with an iPad to attempt to pick up sound. Luckily I had a good friend and sound engineer, Steve Nash, alongside me to troubleshoot. Steve was invaluable over the next few months by managing a hired PA from Rigs and Gigs and saving the sound with an equalizer from home as I ran video off my iPad and tried to match the projector share-screen on a laptop across March and April. [I would not recommend any of these methods for live-streaming]. Luckily by the end of the run of Spring lectures, Tim had arrived with the kit and started training us up before the Summer season.
A brief interlude to nerd out over the kit! Tim set us up with a HP Omen gaming laptop with a high enough GPU to produce a HD stream and recording. The video feed were two PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras with a joystick controller and preset angles. Video ran through my new favourite toy, an ATEM Mini Extreme for visual input switching and a Streamdeck for graphic elements and a second screen for shot set-up and monitoring. Luckily I’d already had some experience with OBS and after a day with Tim, the PMC crew felt like confident broadcasters on the cameras. The audio took a while longer to master, but came via 4 Rode Wireless Go mics and an XLR goose-neck from the lectern, all run through a Yahama sound desk direct to the laptop.
Over the next few months I came to love (and become very protective) of our new set-up. Through April and May, myself, Dani and the rest of the PMC event producers worked on the summer Public Lecture Course: Britain and World in the Middle Ages, (under Tim’s supervision). Once we ironed out a few sound issues, Dani and I were ready to go it alone for the flagships summer programme Liquid, Crystal, Concrete: The Arts in Postwar Britain 1945–1965, a series of six lectures inspired by the Barbican exhibition, Postwar Modern. This time around we were flying solo, and things got a little trickier, since I was both the events manager and the AV lead for the series. Shout out now to all the support from PMC colleagues that summer.
By this stage I was nearing the end of my time at PMC and really wanted to crack full hybrid before I went. First came what I’d call ‘dodgy hybrid’, which I attempted for the ECRN & DRN Symposium in June, Re-considering British Art History, with Networks Manager, Bryony Bothwright-Rance. I’d not yet figured how to switch like I’d seen at MK Gallery, but I figured with a little manual assistance on the PA system I could share my own laptop screen for the hybrid portions and stream online speakers into the room. It’s not as smooth as proper hybrid, but the crowd was cheery and it did the trick. Though once or twice I panicked and forgot the logic of my camera feed and created what I’d like to call an ‘infinite Zoom hole’!
Right at the end of my contract, as I handed back over to the regular PMC Event Manager, Ella Fleming, I finally had a few spare hours on my hands. I had promised all summer to move the tech to the other side of the Lecture Theatre to free up a doorway to the reception space, and took this as my chance to test out my theory on how to hybrid switch the video feeds. After extensive arguments with a set of bi-directional SDI | HDMI convertors, drawing invisible roadmaps into the ether and a YouTube deep-dive, I at long-last found the video-output buttons that had been staring at me for six months. Relieved and very pleased I went for broke and added some audio inputs for the lectern, blasted some Run the Jewels (I hope I was alone in the building) and dipped out around 7pm. The next day was my last day at the Paul Mellon Centre, so I had to say goodbye to the [my] AV desk and hope the notes I left behind make sense.