TED is the premier global conference, known worldwide for the TED Talks. At their flagship conference held annually in Vancouver, they partner with select companies to produce branded content that leads the conversation on the power of ideas, the future of work, change and leadership, and many other topics, in the TED style and format.
Skillen & Co. partnered with TED in 2019 to visually develop and produce a series of videos for three partner companies at TED: Facebook, Zebra Technologies and TD Ameritrade. Taking advantage of the expertise of key attendees and speakers at the TED conference in Vancouver, we filmed innovative and engaging interview-based videos in a temporary studio setup at the convention centre.
Creatively, this project was a highly collaborative process with the Skillen & Co. team (over 20 people throughout the stages of each project), the TED partnerships and custom content
creation team and the creative team at each of the partner companies. Working with the featured interviewees and topics provided by TED and the partner company, Skillen & Co.
developed the visual and creative concepts to deliver the content in a compelling and innovative format. The creative process was rapid, over the span of 3 weeks – in concert with pre-production happening concurrently, and required our team to be very adaptable and work on short turnarounds to revise and produce new creative as the situation and subject matter was developed leading up the TED conference.
Filming took place over one week at the TED conference. We built a temporary studio in a room at the convention centre, changing the setup each day for each partner’s videos. We dealt with challenges on the fly such as an interview that was cancelled and replaced at the last minute, and multiple schedule and logistical changes.
Post-Production required an efficient and adaptable schedule to meet delivery deadlines, work with multiple creative teams at TED and the partner companies for input and feedback on edits, and manage multiple specialists in the post-production process (editor, director, sound mixing, colourist, motion graphics designers). We delivered multiple formats of each project, capitalizing on the production so far to provide multiple edit lengths and video formats for distribution options on TED and partner channels, across social media, websites, mobile and desktop.
