Beantown Throwdown, MIT Enterprise Forum

We recently filmed a live event called Beantown Throwdown, which is hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum. The Throwdown was basically a business pitch competition where local students pitch real businesses they’ve started and seek votes like investors. We were there to film the pitches for later use by the MIT Enterprise Forum as web video content. There were a couple of challenges we had to tackle in order to deliver a quality product.

White out

The pitches were delivered in a large room against a large white wall. There was also a banner off to the side with a white background. While it looked fine in the room, it wasn’t a particularly good look on camera. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything that could be done this time, but this is something our video producers are always aware of and try to avoid when possible. Thankfully, the students were engaging enough to keep the blank environment interesting.

Audio out

The audio was another tricky situation. The microphones went through speakers, but unfortunately those speakers were mounted on a very high ceiling and the audio system didn’t have any way for us to attach our equipment. We couldn’t set up wireless microphones or get close enough to get reliable wired audio, so we set up one microphone pointed at the ceiling to pick up the speakers and hid another as close to the front as we could manage. The big risk was that we’d pick up too much crowd sound on the microphones which would mean more time spent trying to clean it in postproduction.

In the end we were able to capture the event and provide some fascinating content for the MIT Enterprise Forum. These students told fantastic stories about the work they’d been doing, and in the end capturing their enthusiasm and stories is what will make this content and event so engaging.