Our organization recently staged a major event for members of senior management and some of their staff from over 30 of the corporations we do business with. Obviously, we wanted to make a positive impression, conduct a quality affair and present our company in a unique fashion. The audience was a sophisticated one, with representatives of both Fortune 500 and major regional companies attending, so the bar was set high from the start.
How did we accomplish our objective? This and several future TMC blog entries will outline how we used Macintosh expertise, an Apple product, some online resources and even a user group connection to develop several event components that helped differentiate it from others and left the attendees talking. So, strap a PowerBook on each hip and let’s get started.
Event Structure
I won’t bore you with all the details involved in planning an event like this because they aren’t relevant to this discussion. Suffice it to say that the first day of 
Innovations 2005 consisted of a lunch, golf outing, reception and dinner for the senior management of all involved parties on Thursday and a more structured set of activities on Friday that included a continental breakfast, a presentation about The Alliance (our company), a “vendor fair” type of networking session, lunch with a distinguished speaker, and an awards ceremony to round out the day. The attendee count for Friday was over 300 people.
The Basics
To say that the Mac was at the center of creating all the printed materials (including programs, name tags, place cards, signage, event banners, etc.) would be to state the obvious. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat all played key roles in the creation, editing and delivery of those resources. Being able to do it all in-house increased flexibility from both the design and timing perspectives. It also meant that the event artwork could be scaled, tweaked and adapted for a variety of branding opportunities. Selecting and working with digital printing operations who “spoke” Mac made it even easier.
If these tools, along with a moderate set of skills to use them, isn’t in your repertoire yet, now’s the time to go get a book or two or find a training video and get started. You don’t have to be able to make these programs do backflips to have them seriously increase your productivity for projects like this, not to mention your value to any organization you are associated with.
Get Their Attention
One of our first goals for Friday was to have an opening that would set a positive, professional tone for the day, but not be routine. Something inspiring that everyone in the room could relate to but that wouldn’t take up too much time. We settled on a patriotic song with appropriate imagery to be displayed on the two 9' x 12' screens.
A quick trip through the iTunes Music Store delivered the perfect track: God Bless America by Céline Dion from the "God Bless America: For the Benefit of the Twin Towers Fund” album. It might be the best rendition of that song you'll ever encounter.. A quick $.99 purchase and the track was ready for use. (Research and addressing the licensing issues of playing this song in public were completed later.)
Now to the trickier part: images to go with the music. How do you create visuals to go with such a stirring rendition of a familiar song? I had six photos that I had picked up from a previous project, but that didn’t’ cover the 3 minute, 47 second track, so I surfed over to iStockPhoto.com and started searching on various keywords: “Americana”, “flag,” “patriotic,” etc. Then, after a few more run-throughs of the song, added searches for “mountain,” “ocean” and “prairie.” Additional searches on local city names yielded some great shots to add a “local” flavor.
Using iStockPhoto.com’s Lightbox feature, candidate files were easily collected. The Gallery feature let me share the candidate files with team members and get their opinions. (You can see one of the galleries by logging into iStockPhoto.com and searching for the one called “Americana.” Creating an account is free.)
The challenge quickly became choosing the best photos from an almost overwhelming selection of outstanding choices. With over 100 candidate images, 3 minutes and 47 seconds seem woefully inadequate. The solution was to back into the slide show by playing the track over and over and picking the photo that best displayed the feel of the music at that point, the lyrics and the photo preceeding or following.
You might argue that the slideshow feature of iPhoto 5 wasn’t the best tool for this, but it was a known commodity and provided easy to use control over the photos as well as the ability to include the Ken Burns effect on select images to enhance the presentation. Using iMovie for the timeline editor would have been nice, but was not necessary. Adding photos one by one simplified the timing issue.
Taking a page from the presenter’s handbook, two totally black images were added to the beginning and end of the project, to facilitate fade-in, fade-out, and switching of video sources from the iMag cameras in use at the event to the PowerBook and back.
The result was a powerful 35-photo slideshow with music that had many of the attendees wiping away tears by the time it was over. Delivered straight from my PowerBook out to the big screens, the AV crew did hard cuts in and out from the black images and the result was perfect.
While I can’t share the fully completed project with you due to the music rights, a QuickTime movie of the slideshow is available, if you don't mind a 30-meg download. (If you purchase the audio track, just play them together and you’ll get an even better feel for how it all came together.) The small size (320 x 240) doesn’t do it full justice, but should give you an idea of what you can put together using some excellent stock photography and a little creativity. Perhaps best of all, with iStockPhoto’s pricing structure, it didn’t break the bank to produce.
