McAfee
Virtual Event Production MPOWER Digital 2020
EVI, Virtual Event Production. MPOWER Digital 2020 Virtual Event is McAfee’s global customer experiential event designed to bolster understanding of and offer solutions to battle the evolving cybersecurity threatscape. Attendees are frontline IT professionals who work to protect the digital economy across every enterprise and institution. As stated by McAfee CTO Steve Grobman, “Our goal is to arm our customers with the technologies they need to defend their environments from the sophisticated threats of 2020.”
This year saw McAfee and experiential partner EVI pivot from 12 consecutive years of producing one of the world’s top in-person events to a completely virtual event, digital platform designed for the times. A robust online experience of more than 75 sessions provided a detailed look at McAfee’s innovative technologies, from NextGen, SWG and SASE, to XDR and the latest in cloud security.
As part of a broad collaborative effort with McAfee, Virtual Event Production Company EVI took responsibility for producing the marquee content for the experience, consisting of five keynote presentations from McAfee’s executive team, and ten Power Spotlight Presentations featuring the company’s top experts.
With MPOWER attendees accustomed to a highly sophisticated live setting, the goal was to find a way to preserve that very important branded presence within the new MPOWER Digital format. To emphasize the importance of the keynote messaging, EVI designed a custom virtual environment as a presentation framework. The elegant, contemporary set featured multiple surfaces for the design team to work with.
Keynote speakers were filmed on a custom-built green screen stage at McAfee’s San Jose, CA and Plano, TX offices. Recorded in 4k, the productions were configured with three cameras to provide a variety of viewing perspectives. The solution enabled the EVI post team to create a fluid and dynamic final edit.
Once edited, speaker performances were composited into the virtual set to create a beautiful and imaginative environment. Multiple elements made up the overall composited look, including 16:9 content graphics crafted by the McAfee design team, and a collection of stunning background graphics to paint the widescreen set wall. Several augmented reality graphics provided an additional layer of motion media to accentuate key messages. As a final touch, the top line of the set wall featured a scrolling ribbon of McAfee slogans to reinforce brand messaging.
To distinguish them from the keynote presentations, a separate virtual environment was created for the ten Power Spotlight Sessions. The set was designed to have a common visual aesthetic, while presenting a scale more appropriate for the deep technical content dive of the Spotlight Sessions. The Spotlight Presenters were captured on the aforementioned green screen stages and composited together in the same manner as the keynotes, complete with 16:9 support and background graphics.
Of course, as is inevitable in the current pandemic, travel restrictions prohibited several executives from taping at the headquarters studios. For those presenters, EVI utilized its custom remote production kits to ensure a high level of quality. Those presentations were composited together with 16:9 support graphics and a background frame to provide visual continuity with the other keynotes.
Digital event production introduces a completely new set of challenges for the event world. Aside from the complexities of travel and logistics, the elements of virtual design, augmented reality, composited layers of graphics in post-production and the building and implementation of a digital infrastructure factor heavily into the design process. Management of client expectations alone presents a dynamic much different than a live event. For executive presenters accustomed to the more forgiving production timeline of an in-person format, the advance preparedness required of pre-recorded content delivery is a major paradigm shift.
Whether embarking on a live, digital or hybrid production, EVI’s experience and elite-level producing and project management talents continue to distinguish the team across the events industry.
We are greatly honored to have continued our long-standing partnership with McAfee to achieve the first ever Digital MPOWER Virtual Event.
EVI is a leading Virtual Event Production company. Read more about our Virtual Event Production services in our Virtual Event Production page.