Corporate Awards Event Video Production

Hey guys, this is J over at Firebrand Media and today we’re talking about corporate award ceremonies. What are they? What can you expect out of them? And how can a production company strategically work through them with you?

So corporate award ceremonies, they’re basically a celebration. They’re there to recognize the people who have excelled or have achieved something in a business or a company that’s putting on the event. We’ve done everything from graduation ceremonies to again corporate award ceremonies and they typically follow the same format and structure.

So typically the award ceremony will be opened by a keynote speech or some presenter that’s going to talk about the history of the company or business, explain the accolades and the awards and why they’re being given to the people that are going to receive them. This could be anything from sales awards to company commitment awards to tenure awards, being how long someone’s been a part of something or an organization. And they’re pretty lengthy.

From a production company standpoint, it’s important to focus on your power and data. So if this event is going to be a long event, making sure that you have dummy batteries that are plugged into the camera and going straight to a power source is going to be your best approach. When it comes to data, making sure that you have longer cards that can hold more data, 256GB CF Express Type-A cards is not going to work. You might need to bump that up to half a terabyte or find half a terabyte cards that you can easily switch and switch out between moments of the award ceremony.

So like I said, they’re kind of long, but they follow the same structure being that when you have your, after you have your keynote speaker open up the award ceremony, what will happen is they will probably come and get on stage and they’ll want to take pictures. Now if the production company is tasked to also gather photo, the photographer will need to get center of stage and close up to the stage to get those shots. It’s going to interrupt the programming of the video capture. Well, that’s okay because we generally have a second angle for those budgets.

Once the award recipient has taken a photo on stage with the speaker, they will likely exit stage left or stage right to a step and repeat or some type of banner that they’ll take a picture with their actual award. And that isolate or clean image is used in an archive for writing and marketing purposes for that company. Once all recipients of a certain type of award have been received and have exited stage, they will all come back up for one group photo and then exit. And then that keynote speaker on stage will guide them into the next category of awards.

Now this could be anywhere from 45 minutes to up to an hour and a half. That’s why I hark on the importance of power and data. If you don’t have the proper memory cards for this type of activity or this type of event, what you’ll find yourself doing is interrupting the recording. And if you don’t have that second camera angle, let’s say 45 degrees off the center or stage left or stage right of the actual stage, that could cause some complications in making a seamless stitch in the post-production that highlights the whole award ceremony.

As mentioned prior, we’ve done several types of award ceremonies. Again, graduations, corporate award ceremonies, some happening offsite at dinner locations. It’s not uncommon for them to break setting, being that they can happen offsite or onsite, but generally they’re happening in a ballroom or some kind of conference center, you know, at a hotel.

One of our clients, Harbor Group Management, actually has a year over year award ceremony recognizing the achievements of people in sales, people in marketing, you know, people in tenure of the company who’s been there the longest, who’s a top performer of this department, you know, XYZ, everything under the sun. But what this does is it improves morale of the company. It brings people together under one house for one day or one night, there for celebration and to build the camaraderie of the business.

The way we handle that corporate award ceremony is very industry standard for production being that we have a second angle as a safety and often the beauty angle stage left, and then we have our main angle and both of those angles are on sticks. Now if the budget allows, having a videographer on a gimbal with a lighter camera system will also add to the appeal for let’s say if they want an event recap versus a full A to Z run through of the event. We can capture beauty shots in slow motion and then make a sizzle reel or a recap video.

We usually tap in with the AV group for that hotel conference center that same day and we make sure that we have a direct feed for recording what’s happening on stage. Oftentimes we don’t have to mic up the people that are going to be on stage but rather we want to make sure that we have a solid connection with audio so that when we go into posts, we’re not having to deal with audio issues and whatnot. We do add a field recorder to the AV booth so that we’re capturing all microphones that hit the stage.

Because we handle the full stack of their production needs for their corporate award ceremonies year over year, we also get the photography added to it. That being usually we have a floating photographer that’s capturing the guest interaction leading into the award ceremony. We’re capturing the stage. We’re also capturing people’s reactions or the crowd reactions of the stage. We’re getting the stage shots of the awards being handed off to the recipients. At the same time, there’s a flow, being that when they exit stage left or stage right, there’s a step and repeat with the branding behind it, where they will hold their award chest level and we’ll take a clean, straight on image of them as well in front of that step and repeat.

All in all, corporate award ceremonies are straight to the point. The runner show is very strict. You’ll find that there’s less wiggle room in a corporate award ceremony, just like in a graduation program. The speaker’s on stage to tell everybody what the awards are for, guiding those people on stage to receive their awards, and then moving into the next group of award recipients.

By the close of the award ceremony, there might be a celebration point where everybody stands up and claps and recognizes those award recipients, as well as some last remarks and founding statements from top leadership in the company. This typically ends the award ceremony and then everybody breaks away from there.

If you have any questions about corporate award ceremonies and want help from a production company that’s done these quite often, feel free to call us here at Firebrand Media. We’d love to help.