5th Wall Forum: REVEAL (Virtual Conference)
When people ask how to get involved with cool projects, often my answer is: show up. In August 2020, I was part of a tweet thread that bridged the theater and XR communities regarding the possibility of a coalition for fostering and supporting education and innovation for live performance during the shutdown. As later summarized by Kyle Wright from The Shubert Organization, “The theater community needs a tourniquet right now.” From that original tweet, a weekly meeting began with myself, Samantha Wolfe, David Rodriguez, Alex Coulombe, Brandon Powers, Adaora Udoji, Stephanie Riggs, and Kyle Wright. Ultimately, this collective became the founding members of The 5th Wall Forum.
I can say (with some humility) that it was my first real experience being part of a “developmental committee,” with many of our early months dedicated to academically discussing intentionality, operations and industry analysis. I was easily the least experienced person “in the room” which felt pretty exhilarating most days. My core contribution and unfair advantage was my accidental access to dozens of grassroots storytellers and institutions around the world, literally fighting to meet this moment and survive the emerging virtual ecosystem. A think tank wasn’t going to help them keep the lights on and it felt meaningful to give them a voice.
5WF December Conference
Within four months we designed, organized and produced a free virtual conference with a Kickoff Event, Bring Your Production Virtual workshop and a Connector Lab. We labeled ourselves as the Founding Advisory Board Members and approached a group of Mentors to present and support our workshop participants. The Kickoff Event, led by Kyle Wright, Brandon Powers and Tim Kashani, set the “stage” for 300+ attendees with a background overview and vernacular of extended reality technologies and tools. I was tasked with leading Bring Your Production Virtual which empowered the majority of our attendees to immediately D.E.V.I.S.E. any live production into a virtual performance using my “6 Key Considerations.” Meanwhile Stephanie Riggs and Alex Coulombe ran the Connector workshop for a select group of participants curated via a separate application process.
The two-day event took place mostly using Zoom’s Webinar feature as I ran Open Broadcaster Software to switch between graphics and media clips. For my workshop, I also used a virtual camera to show our audience a real-time experience “inside” Mozilla Hubs and Alex Coulombe designed an hosted an afterparty in Altspace.
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UPDATE MARCH 2021: Immediately after the event, we shifted to support our Connector Teams via our Discord Channel, Mentor office hours and regular milestones, culminating in the development of 9 prototypes of immersive projects built in 3 months in a collaboration between live storytelling producers and XR technologists. On March 13th, we hosted a follow up-virtual event, called REVEAL where each Team presented an eight-minute overview of their prototype, including a “glimpse” of real-time performance. Kent Bye from Voices of VR live-tweeted an overview of the presentations.
As a scrappy storyteller, I could not be more proud of our 9 Connector Team presentations, many of which I directly helped implement or troubleshoot in the hours leading up to event. But also, after a year of exploring and promoting dozens of virtual technologies, REVEAL was my first experience producing a polished Zoom Event without any budget or full-time staff. I’ve consulted a lot on best practices for video chat video, audio and “tiling” methods, but mostly avoided developing my own workflow in the interest of exploring other case-studies for immersive technology.
So I thought I should share my learnings for folks producing Zoom events without a budget…
STEP ONE: Every week is Tech Week
The faster and more reliable our technology, the more important it becomes to minimize human error. Technology is only a tool. Performing or presenting to an audience in virtual space requires the same amount of time, talent and planning as it does in physical space. One of the unfair advantages of every company in the world being forced into video conferencing for a year is that every single meeting became an opportunity and invitation to identity the needs, challenges and best practices for each team member to reliably broadcast themselves. Rather than waiting for “tech week,” each rehearsal and production meeting is an opportunity to integrate and identify the best set up for each performer. So during our regular zoom calls, I would test “tiling” and “cues” as if it were a webinar to help troubleshoot recurring problems and build reliable cues.
STEP TWO: Delegate
When we’re all stuck behind a computer, it’s easy to forget how much thought and work goes into delineating roles and responsibilities for “front of house,” “on stage” and “backstage.” For 5th Wall Forum, we used Zoom and Discord as our “backstage” to bring speakers “on and off” and live-streamed the final result to an audience on YouTube. This came down to team work:
Brendan (me) running Open Broadcaster Software (like being in the booth)
Kyle and Adaora hosting the event (like being our emcees on stage)
Brandon in charge of “pinning” our Speakers in Zoom and giving them co-host ability when it was their turn to screen share (like stage managing in the wings).
Stephanie monitoring the Zoom and Discord chat to keep our Speakers organized and “on deck” (like an ASM)
Alex monitoring the YouTube chat to answer audience questions from our secondary stream (like an Usher or House Manager)
Samantha monitoring our live pledging form responses (a crucial role for any pledge drive event)
For any virtual event, I would recommend integrating a Stage Manager early in the process to help establish best practices for your virtual rehearsal “room” and a Technologist who can troubleshoot performers during rehearsal and audience during performances. This gives you a longer runway to identify which team member to delegate which tasks.
STEP THREE: Set Expectations
Your team will find the practices that work best for them and the event you’re creating. As you discover these elements, document them in a “welcome packet” that goes out with each new rehearsal invitation. As you discover new and better methods, update your language and see if it makes life easier for your team. This process of “onboarding” is complicated and different for everyone, but the more your attendees know what to expect, the less they will be discouraged by the process.
We used a google document so anyone could contribute ideas or subsections. I’m often surprised by the variety of methods and terms different individuals use for the same action. Creating a shared language (even for boring simple tasks) helps streamline communication overall.
By show time, we had clear and concise language to include in our ticket emails to help onboard the audience and speakers. When we experienced known issues, any team member could assist because we had a shared understanding of our show’s process.
STEP FOUR: Deliverables
Ask ten actors for a photo and you will somehow get ten different media files with varying file formats, resolution, file size, and dimensions. Now multiply this by every single graphic or video you want to include in your presentation and it can become and eye sore and lead to organizational and streaming errors.
Any asset that you intend to appear on screen is known as a “deliverable” and your team should decide the “standard” that is best for your event. For example, if the majority of your viewers will be on laptops or small-screened devices, you don’t want slides with lots text in small fonts. Or if you’re planning on showing a graphic full screen, you want a high resolution image so it doesn’t appear blurry.
For our event, I suggested PNG images at 1080x1920 dimensions no larger than 15MB and with minimal text on the screen. Similarly for videos I suggested exporting MP4s at H264 at 1080x1920 and keeping videos to no longer than 90 seconds unless the speaker planned to talk over the video to maintain the sense of “live” presentation. I find that many people still make mistakes or can’t figure out how to deliver their media correctly, but setting a universal standard at least gives your team a baseline from which to build. (It’s easier for me to “fix” a handful of files rather than essentially re-deisgn all the files for the entire show).
STEP FIVE: Micro-Branding
It doesn’t take much to “dress up” your presentation. It could be as simple as giving everyone the same background image to replace their background or as complex as building custom motion graphics. Branding an event with a unified color palette, font, and layout can immediately make your event look professionally produced. I like to think of this like traditional scenic, lighting and costume design - rather than putting a bunch of odds and ends on stage, establish an aesthetic for your specific show. Throughout the shut down Zoom and several other video conferencing providers have released new tools and tricks to help customize the layout and look of your experience.
Adding a broadcaster tool like Open Broadcaster Software allows you to build more traditional “cues” to switch between combinations of your participants and their deliverables. For 5WF, I captured the gallery view of our zoom conference as a Window Capture in OBS. Then I duplicated this “scene” and cropped the window to each individual participant. Now I could build different cues with different participants in the gallery organized on the screen.
A lot of Zoom fatigue comes from staring at the same Brady bunch boxes and feeling like you’re always being watched. A traditional show is broken up with light cues, sound cues, scene changes…ebbs and flows in the energy required by the audience and performers that allow us to focus our attention and intention. But we rarely get that virtually. It’s either off or on. Micro-branding is my effort to think of “segments” (like a radio show) where you can break the audience out of the box for a few seconds, give them a sense of closure on the previous scene, and scoop the energy for the next scene.
I use OBS to create “singer transitions” that play a short animation and music cue as it switches from one cue to the next. You can find cheap packages of these effects online or build your own. Too much effort? Did you know you can use a video instead of a picture in your background replacement? You could also just break up the presentations by cutting to a slideshow and some music every 15-20 minutes to give viewers a stretch. Anything to change the energy and divide up the event into digestible “Acts” with their own micro-branding.
STEP SIX: Monitoring
Screen real estate is precious and it gets complicated when you’re operating multiple applications at the same time and trying to keep an eye on the chat. My least favorite feature of video conferencing is when someone shares their screen and it “takes over” my computer. You can modify some of this in your preferences, but at some point…we’re going to need a bigger boat.
As an artist, I neither have the budget or the space in my apartment for a second monitor, but I do have a TV. During my performance for Museum of Science, I bought a 25 foot HDMI cable (~$15) and started using my television as a monitor to see the chat and my composition on a large screen. It works great especially if I can delegate the Zoom workflow to someone else while screen capture.
STEP SEVEN: Engage
What’s the point of doing all this work to present live if you don’t interact with your audience. Trust me, editing pre-recorded videos is equal work and hassle, but less pressure and anxiety. I really like to use the chat to stoke conversation and get viewers engaging with each other. For my “speaking engagements” to colleges and institutions, I usually prep a handful of playful prompts or call to actions. I also make sure that either myself or a dedicated collaborator is monitoring the chat for any questions or reactions we can address live during the presentation. Know you’re going to reference something complicated? Drop a link at that section for those who want to learn more.
For 5WF, we took turns at the different events and presentations supporting each other’s chat. During our Kickoff Event, Tim Kashani gave an amazing presentation where he actually brought out a dozen different “early generation VR headsets” almost like taking the audience around a museum display. Our team quickly typed out the complicated names and descriptions for viewers that might have missed it and googling supplemental articles to drop in the chat. Members of the audience joined in and started sharing their own resources and information and the chat became its own hub of shared knowledge.
You have the best opportunity before and after your show to learn how to make your show a success: Feedback. It can feel personal and frustrating when visitors poke holes in your process, but often their criticism comes from a genuine desire to enjoy your show. This feedback offers key insights into what is preventing your audience from fully connecting. Find some time (or some team members) to properly receive and even seek out this feedback. We’ve had a lot of success using google surveys as a follow up to our ticket email 24 hours after the show.
Conclusion
Especially as we’re all eager to “get back” to in-person gatherings, it will become more important than ever to make sure we’re creating worthwhile virtual experiences for our audiences and the educate and empower storytellers with these new technologies. That’s the mission of The 5th Wall Forum and the #FutureStages. I hope it helps!