From one to the next! We’re currently finishing up a Global FS Tax Leaders event in Paris whilst simultaneously preparing for a Future of Work Conference in Madrid!
The Future of Work Conference will be held at The Westin Palace, a gorgeous, modern hotel renowned for its large events space and capacity. There will be 24 Cypher Media crew on site to set up and manage the event. We will be catering for over 200 delegates during the 3-day-long conference.
The main room will host a 4-meter high twin screen set, along with 4 3m high x 1.5m wide free-standing LED columns.
Over the course of this week we’ve been busy preparing our kit for a Financial Services Conference being held in Paris, and a Future of Work Conference that will take place shortly after in Madrid.
The Financial Services Conference is being held at the Westin Paris. This will be a 3-day event and over 20 crew will be used from rig to de-rig.
The main room will have a huge 48ft 3:12 aspect ratio screen, the same width as the whole room. The two 12ft side screens can link to the main screen, or be used as individual screens with seamless switching.
With two conferences in two weeks, it's going to be a hectic fortnight for most of the crew!
We only had a small room, with no windows, so we had to be clever about how we set up our shot. We used one of our Dedolights and gobo projector attachment to create a window blind shadow on the wall behind the subject. Coupled with our easily portable LED lights, this created a studio like environment in the small space.
We used our Sony FS7 with 50mm Samyang lens so that we could be fairly close to the subject whilst also allowing us to throw the background out of focus.
Several years ago this would not have been possible with the kit we used to have but now we have much greater flexibility.
We’ve treated our self to some new kit at the Cypher Media office! The Zhiyun Crane Handheld Gimbal has been added to our arsenal of equipment.
This gimbal is excellent due to its easy to use one-handed operation and compact design. It can be used to create cinematic video by eliminating camera shakiness, making the video as smooth as silk!
We plan on using this piece of tech to get some stunning general videos, or GVs, for use in our opening and closing videos.
After a successful International Tax & Legal conference in Prague, we jetted off to Madrid shortly after for a small two-day shoot at the Melia Castilla, Madrid.
We set up a rig in the conference room consisting of a Sony PMW EX-330 and a Sony PXW-Z150.
Less than two weeks later we were back at the Melia Castilla providing AV equipment and support, as well as onsite editing, branding set & stage building, sound, lighting and much more for an Indirect Taxes Conference.
All of our kit has been collected from the Cypher Media office for next week’s International Tax Academy being held at The Hilton, Prague. We have a fairly large crew of 26 covering the 6 days we’re working on site.
The main room will have a 16ft, 16:9 ratio centralised screen with two 14ft 16:9 screens either side, the set has been designed so that it can be used as one complete room, as well as three separate rooms if need be.
We return to the Cypher office Monday 30th April and get straight into preparing for the next conference, being held at the Melia Castilla Hotel, Madrid in mid-July.
To follow the rules of our information security policy, ISO 27001, and to ensure we are GDPR compliant, we keep our client's files backed up and secure here at Cypher Media.
It is critical that we keep regular backups of our projects, such as video editing files and website backups in fireproof safes both onsite at our office and offsite. This enables us to access and restore data efficiently.
Dharmesh is currently making changes to one of our clients' registration websites. We’ll be working in Tokyo, Japan later in the year so the registration website must be multi-lingual; accessible in both English and Japanese.
Front-end users will be presented with a number of language options when they hit the landing page. On this page, the user can choose the preferred language and carry on with rest of the website as normal.
In preparation for our upcoming Management Conference being hosted in Charlotte, USA, we’ve been busy in the Cypher office getting all of our kit out to create a detailed carnet list containing all of our sound and video equipment, and other miscellaneous items such as green screens and batteries.
The list includes item names, serial numbers and the location of the item. Carnets are mandatory for the temporary importation of equipment into the US; they also allow you to get through customs without paying duties and import taxes on equipment that will be re-exported within 12 months.
We’ll be flying over to the US early next month to provide AV equipment and support.
We felt it’s about time we upgraded our banner printer. Sadly, Canon are discontinuing the inks for our current printer, the Canon ImagePROGRAF iPF6400, which has worked fantastically for the past 10 years, however, this gave us an excuse to purchase one of its successors, the Canon ImagePROGRAF iPF8400SE. This new banner printer is much larger, coming in at 189.3 (W) x 97.1 (D) x 114.4 (H) cm.
It allows us to print banners wider than before, with a size up to 110cm wide. It also comes with a 250GB hard drive and the ability to store more than twice the amount of ink as its predecessor.
Let's get printing!
We're updating our first aid training here at Cypher Media. A total of seven crew will be attending the session; it will be giving us the basics of insight into Health and Safety regulations, managing an incident, resuscitation, blood loss, shock, choking and much more.
The 6-hour-long emergency first aid course ensures that everyone attending meets the requirements for an emergency first aider, as specified in the Health and Safety regulations 1981; it is then valid for three years.
March is a busy month for planning and preparation for upcoming events.
Our first recce of March will be at the Hilton, Prague; a centrally-located business hotel minutes away from the heart of the Czech capital.
We're working in this hotel a total of three times this year for the same client, so the key is to make each event look different whilst keeping within our client's brand.
Following this, we will be travelling to Madrid to look at two venues, each to be used for different events this year. The Westin Palace and the Melia Castilla. Both very different hotels, that each need to be used for two very technology-focused events. The challenge will be how to transform two traditional hotels in to modern event spaces for our clients.
Finally, we have recently completed a site visit to the Ballantyne Hotel. in Charlotte, North Carolina. We'll be working with the hotel AV company but taking a handful of our team from the UK to manage this annual event and keep the same level of quality and consistency our client is used to.
Our first International Tax Academy of 2018 was held at the Rome Marriott Park Hotel, which boasts over 140,000 sq. ft of event space with 40 event rooms and 36 breakout rooms, which were all utilised for meetings of different sizes.
We arrived in Rome on Saturday to rig all day on Sunday for the meetings which started on Monday. Rigging was also taking place throughout Monday for meetings starting later in the week.
The event covered 5 days with a total of 28 technicians operating in the various spaces.
The main room hosted a huge set and stage coming in at an approximate width of 39m (126ft.) and an approximate height of 5m (15ft). This full set was used for an Awards Dinner on one of the evenings, which ended with a a very loud and successful disco which our client loved.
This large room could also be split easily in to 2 stand-alone rooms to host smaller (but still very large) meetings.
One of the sessions was also live streamed to up to 600 attendees through Webex - we used our three HD cameras to send a mixed feed in to the Webex laptop so we could cut between them at the appropriate times.
We're always looking for new ways to get creative with our clients and introduce new technologies. We recently supplied a mesmerising 3D holographic display to one of our client events in Barcelona, which received very positive feedback.
The stunning high-quality display and built-in speaker system definitely turned a few heads.
We filmed and edited one of our clients presenting in front of a green screen, in order to remove the background and give the illusion that he was floating inside the holographic glass display.
The hologram works by utilising light diffraction to create a virtual 3D image of an object to bring it to life in the 270°, 3 sided viewing hologram display.
As many of our client events are focusing on technology this year, we’ll definitely be using holographic displays more in the future.
Please feel free to contact us if you’d like to enquire about having a holographic display at your event.