In many ways, the production of the Conference will be very similar to how we’ve done it in the past.  The big exception of course is, this time without a live audience!  The entire audience will be watching the “program” from the comfort of their homes much like how our “satellite venue” attendees have for many years.  

We’ve decided to use the Camden Opera House as our home base because it will provide a familiar and comforting visual background for this year’s “special” program.  Also, the Opera House has the high speed internet bandwidth required to meet the technical needs of the production.  Our normal tech crew will all be backstage with their Powerpoint computers, video players, sound mixers, TV switchers, and Livestream equipment and all the other things we use to put on the show.  

This year, the speakers will present using a Zoom type webinar platform that will feed into our backstage TV switcher where we will add appropriate title slides, movies, and audio to formulate a finished “program” that will be sent out via our Livestream feed to all attendees.  Our moderator, who will probably play a bigger role this year, will be on the stage at the Opera House overseeing and directing the program as it evolves over the two days.  We will, as always, have panel discussions but will see our speakers all together “on screen” rather than on stage.  We will field questions from attendees via dedicated email and text portals that will feed directly into our back stage Q+A computers and then on to our moderator.

Sure, there are some special challenges for this year’s Conference but I think the AV crew and production staff are looking forward to meeting these challenges as we move forward.  As always, the show must go on!