Meeting Of The Minds Africa

Description:

A two day medical  conference for interventional cardiologists of South Africa  with international speakers. The event was held at the B.O.E auditorium in the V&A Waterfront and a large portion of this meeting was devoted to interactive discussions.

The challenge:

Provide sound for 150 people and microphones for a presenter and a panel of seven people. The presenters will bring their multimedia presentations on flash drives  which could be in  Apple Mac or Windows PC format. Use of the venue’s  permanent screen and roof mounted projector to display the presentations. It is important that audience members are able to engage in discussions with the experts. They need to be able to ask questions in an auditorium where passing microphones around is challenging and time consuming. They also need to be able to vote electronically on questions from the panel.  Make a video recording of the entire conference and edit the footage.

The response:

We used a two speaker P.A since the meeting took place in one half of the auditorium. Our perspex lectern matched the glass top tables and a gooseneck microphone at the podium completed the modern look. “Push-to-talk” delegate microphones were placed on the top tables for the panel discussions and two headset microphones and two hand held microphones was on hand should the need arise. A monitor speaker was placed in front of the stage to allow the panel to hear questions and comments from the floor. The state of the art Lumi interactive voting hand sets allowed audience members to vote on questions, send text questions to be voted on and has a built in microphone . We connected the hand sets to our sound system which allowed the audience to ask questions and give comments to the panel and have an interactive discussion.

We provided two laptops and a MacBook Pro on a network to cater for Windows and Mac presentations and the network meant that we could load presentations during the sessions without any interruption. Confidence monitors were used on stage for the presenters and the panel and slides were controlled with a cordless clicker. An additional monitor was used for the chairman to see the questions that the audience sent in via text on the voting hand sets. The chairman selected some of these questions and the audience was then asked to vote on them. The voting system was connected to our switch gear which allowed us to connect to the venue’s projector and seamlessly switch between the presentation laptops, MacBook, voting questions and DVD player.

The conference was video recorded on a hard drive and on mini DV Cam tapes as a backup. The footage was professionally edited after the event. A profile spot was used to provide much needed lighting for the camera. We also used L.E.D par cans to light the large wire sculpture on the stage. Time keeping was done with a large L.E.D countdown clock that allowed presenters to see exactly how much time they have left for their talk.

The event was highly successful and very interactive with lots of audience participation.

What they said:

Feedback from our high profile delegates was extremely positive and this challenging technical meeting went off flawlessly thanks to your preparation, research on the exact technical requirements for the event, experience and dedicated team work. It is a pleasure working with Corporate Event Staging and we look forward to the next event.

Sue McGuinness – Sue McGuinness Communications & Event Management