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Jedi Mind Tricks for Meetings

Published Friday Aug 13, 2021

Author Ryan Lessard

Connection’s virtual annual conference, produced by Events United and Studio Lab. Courtesy photo.


In February, two NH companies used the same special effects technology from the hit Star Wars show “The Mandalorian” to host an immersive virtual corporate conference to essentially create their own TV show—and they did it live.

Tim Messina, the owner of Events United and Studio Lab in Derry, teamed up with Rob Livie, the manager of video production for Connection, the Merrimack-based global IT company, to put together Connection’s two-week-long annual conference in a virtual setting.

For the past four years, Events United has provided the stage design, sound, lighting and technical support for Connection’s annual conference at places like the DoubleTree by Hilton in Manchester or the SNHU Arena. Last year, they set up the arena for about 1,000 attendees, according to Messina. “We had to make the room [feel] small,” Messina says.

This year’s event had to be different because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the inherent safety concerns of gathering a large group of people in one place. But a Brady Bunch grid of faces in a massive Zoom session was not the answer, nor was a talking head from a green-screen studio.

Essentially, they had the opposite problem from last year. Instead of making a large arena seem smaller to 1,000 people, they needed to make a transmitted virtual space on the 14-inch screen of a home computer seem bigger to about 2,600 people. “We were sort of running into webcam fatigue,” Livie says.

Their solution was to make the corporate event less like a meeting and more like a TV show. They could use Messina’s 2,400-square-foot film studio at Studio Lab, a high-tech modular space in Derry’s industrial area on A Street that has been used to film everything from virtual concerts and commercial ads to the governor’s inaugural address. But if they used a green screen, the emcee and corporate executives addressing the audience would inevitably get sick of it. Livie says it takes a toll trying to wade through an endless sea of lime green for two weeks straight.


Gov. Chris Sununu’s inaugural address, filmed at Studio Lab in Derry. Courtesy photo.


Luckily, they had the technology.

Earlier in 2020, Messina bet on the growing need for virtual events and invested about $800,000 for new tech, including Chauvet 2mm-pixel pitch LED panels—doubling his existing screen wall to 52 feet long and 14 feet tall with up to a 160-degree curve. He also bought OptiTrack motion capture sensors and Disguise media servers.

It was Messina’s 21-year-old nephew Ian Messina, Studio Lab’s director of virtual production, who first saw what the producers of “The Mandalorian” did to create a virtual environment on high-resolution LED screens and realized they could recreate it.

On the heels of the show’s success, the Disney+ app posted a behind-the-scenes series called “Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian,” in which showrunner and producer Jon Favreau explained how the show was filmed. When producers demonstrated how they made their wrap-around LED-screen sound stage—nicknamed “the Volume”—they essentially opensourced it.

“The equipment was all there, but making it all talk and making it all work wasn’t,” Ian Messina says.

One of the first ways Studio Lab used this tech was for Velcro Companies commercials to advertise new mask extender products, Ian says. They built 3D environments using a video game engine and filmed people standing in front of the screen.

The motion capture sensors would track the camera and the camera captured the background with realistic depth using the virtual reality data to adapt the different angles in real time.

It not only worked, it saved time and resources that would have otherwise been spent filming on multiple locations. “We dipped our toe in and got sucked underwater,” Ian says.

Creating the Virtual Conference
The result was similar to what Lucasfilm achieved. Tim Messina estimates about 50 film studios nationwide have similar capacity now and only a few north of New York. But the Connection event may have been the first time it was used live, he says. “This is the first time almost anyone has done this to this scale,” Messina says.

Hosting a live show meant having a crew on staff to manage the software, the cameras, the transitions, on-screen graphics and more. Some of the crew had to be in separate rooms for space and safety reasons, which meant additional monitoring tech so everyone knew what was going on.

But first they had to design a city. Crews from both companies worked together to build a circular stage behind which the LED wall would wrap around. Livie’s team designed and built a 3D virtual cityscape that could be seen through make-believe wall-to-ceiling windows of an imaginary stage set in a glass high-rise. The real wood paneling of the stage, which event host James Hilliard of California stood on for two weeks, matched the video game wood paneling in the room that extended to false walls onscreen.

Outside the “high-rise,” day and night transitioned naturally. Inside, the room became an elevator, zipping up and down to prefabricated levels that signified a different topic or corporate segment was being discussed.

To prepare for the live event, they had to program dynamic controls to manually change the outside environment’s lighting, the virtual stage level and other visual features so that the directors could move things around as needed. “I have to say, as a director, it was so much fun to say ‘can we move the sun over there?’” Livie says in a video explaining how the event was put together.

A floating, rectangular screen-within-the-screen could appear occasionally to display live webcam guests or slideshows. And since soundstage hosts could see them on the LED wall behind them, they could look right at it, instead of staring at a green wall in pretense.

At one point, the event switched to a live performance by musical guest Daughtry, who was physically located in a Nashville, Tennessee studio.

The production value was heightened and the illusion cemented by the back-and-forth transition between a straight camera and a crane. Messina says the response from viewers was incredulous awe. “Is this live? There’s no way this is live,” tech savvy IT workers would remark, but it was, he says.

“It actually makes things easier,” says Hilliard, who had never worked on a stage like this before. “It looked authentic. It looked real.”


Behind the scenes of the Connection virtual conference. Courtesy photo.


Connection’s Vice President of Marketing Jeff Frank declined to say how much the company spent on the February event but called it a “significant investment.” That said, it still cost significantly less than what it would to do the same event in a face-to-face model, according to Frank.

Messina says the investment in tech kept his company alive for the past year. He says they’ve been able to use it to host roughly 120 live events since last March. They dipped into savings for some of it and paid for the screen expansion by refinancing the building, he says.

Now, he hopes to market this new virtual live event technology to more corporate clients. Depending on the scale, timeframe and complexity, the cost of virtual productions can vary widely, Messina says.

Still, the world of virtual production is new and companies like Events United and Studio Lab are still developing their technology. Messina says they’ve given a number of demos so far, and each time they’re at a different stage of development.

As the market for live events is poised to return following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, Messina says the only concern he has is the potential for too much work. The screen equipment is versatile enough to be used for a growing demand for film projects and can also be used for stage backdrops at live concerts and corporate events.

“This time has also let us heavily step into the film industry,” Messina says. “Virtual production is where the film industry is headed as far as replacing green screen.”

He does expect live events to rapidly replace virtual events, for the most part, over the next year, but that won’t mean their investments were fruitless. Some companies have expressed an interest in continuing virtual events since it saves on hotel, food, venue and other costs associated with live events, and others may want to incorporate virtual technology into live events.

“We would not have been able to do these things before if we had not gone through this,” Messina says.

He expects a pent-up demand for live events will mean more demand than they and other events companies will be able to handle. That paired with a pivot to more film projects means growth. Messina says he expects to see about a 200% revenue increase in 2022 compared to 2019, and they’re already looking for a bigger space in southern NH to meet their growing needs.

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