10 Years of Skift Global Forum The final video viewed in both the full stage and 16x9 crops. It was designed to work as well watching in-person on an 80ft stage as it would watching at home on a laptop.
Project Description and Planning
The 10th annual Skift Global Forum was held at The Pavilion on The Farm at Javits Center in September of 2023. Leading up the event, I was asked to create a video celebrating 10 years of Skift’s iconic forum and its stage sessions. The video played on an approximately 80ft long x 16ft tall LED stage panel to start the conference, and played concurrently to the virtual audience streaming in a 16x9 broadcast online.
So that was the challenge: Make it work on an 80 ft screen and on an iPhone. The mandate was to make it exciting enough to open an event but to not be overly frenetic in my edits.
My solution: Focus all of the actual session clips in the center 16x9 portion of the stage screen, having animations start and move through the extremes of the frame. This makes use of the impressively large canvas for people experiencing it in the room, but leaves everything that could not be missed (the content) live in the center of the frame so it could be easily cropped and broadcast to the at-home audience.
Early rendering of the pavilion layout, stage and screen, provided by the production company Legend.
Onsite image of the assembled stage, side panels, and seating at the pavilion. The screen was approximately 80’ wide x 16’ high.
Our design team had created a 10 Years of Skift Global Forum step and repeat that was physically printed and installed at the event. I copied and expanded on this pattern to serve as an intro and room settle graphic. From there I quickly came up with the idea of transforming the yellow circles in the 10 years of SGF pattern into the dots on a timeline, since the heart of this video was a retrospective of the last 10 years of this event. The timeline conceit was very useful. It served as a transition to the content, labeled the content for the viewers’ benefit (i.e., this is a clip from 2014, 2015, etc), and graphically it allowed me to spill out of the 16x9 virtual crop to the full screen crop, adding movement that seemed organic and dynamic, while not being over stimulating or over done.
Intro sequence of the video, utilizing and building upon the “step and repeat” art that was created for a physical installation at the event by the Skift design team.
The “step and repeat” art as used in the actual physical space at Skift Global Forum 2023.
The last visual element was my decision to use the unique branding from each year of the event as my backgrounds and unifying elements. For the audience in the room, they would get the full branding experience, including the logo lock ups + animations over on the lefthand side of the frame, while the virtual (16x9) audience would see the backgrounds as a small frame around the edge of the session clips.
Diagram showing the full stage vs 16x9 crop of the intro video. It was critical that the video work both on the 80ft stage screen for the audience in the room, as well as for the virtual audience watching on their phones or computers.
