Re: Shooting a conference in San Francisco, tips?

Well, go ahead and shoot some coverage of registration, that really is not much use except in a news-style report, though. Seems to me you want to shoot two things: a little news documentary piece, and a promo/commercial. The approach for each is different.

For the Video News Release (VNR), you will compose about two minutes of b-roll and cut-aways over a narrating reporter describing the event, and you'll drop in two or three short bites of interviews in between all that, to carry thru a general theme. You will incorporate the 5 W's of journalism, who what when where why. In your case the most important W's are the "what" and the "why", so your interview clips should center on people explaining what this topic is and why it is of interest to attend, what it is that attendees get out of it.

You shoot that in the crowded lobby with evidence of large crowds milling in the background. You need a large softlight like a chimera or rifa, or a fluorescent light or LED panel, to wrap the stand-up interviewees in flattering light. You will probably hand-hold a mic under their face or use a shotgun mic at close range to isolate their words from the crowd noise.

Ask open-ended questions of these people, nothing that can be answered in a yes or no. You know better than I what kind of topics to cover on the subject specifically. But ask questions where the responder has to give a value explanation, to compare and contrast, to draw analogies.

Your b-roll for this is limited to the crowd registration scenes, perhaps shots of the hall during set-up and rehearsal before the show starts, exterior of the venue to place the location, close-ups of any brochures or publications and advertising on display in the lobby, and shots of people interacting with each other as the wait to get in and when they come out..


The second piece you do is the promo-commercial. In that one, concentrate on endorsement statements by people who attended, and whatever you can get from the speakers, which should be geared to short declarative statements, and focus on what value the conference brings to you for attending, how it will change your life or at least teach you something new. Support it with a lot of animated graphics that use symbols for the concepts.