Online Production Values

Photo of a laptop in a dark room, half open so the keyboard is illuminated in bright colours by the screen

For in-person events, ‘production’ refers to the practicalities of staging a real thing in front of an audience - equipment, lighting, microphones, etc. If you’re speaking at a venue or delivering a workshop for a school or organisation, most of this is arranged for you - but there are still some ways you can make your activities look slicker and run more smoothly. (Check the In-person Tech page for full advice!).

Online, many of these these production decisions work very differently, but you will find that much more comes down to decisions at your end, instead of full reliance on the venue's setup etc.

Quite a lot depends on the choice of software the host uses to run the event.

On this page we'll cover some of the basic questions you will need to discuss with the host, and some upgrades that will help you give a smooth online delivery.

Basic Event Setup

How will attendees log in to your online session?

This will affect your entire session design, particularly any interactivity you plan for. Some possible answers are given below. We'd recommend an early conversation with the host for full clarity on these questions:

  • Attendees log in individually from a device each? (e.g. from home, or on individual laptops in a classroom)
    • Will they be able to open a webpage and interact with e.g. Geogebra individually?
    • Who will handle unknown/unrecognised attendees?
    • Can attendees be removed if necessary? Who has the final decision on this?
  • As a group watching on a projector? (e.g. a classroom watching a large projector screen)
    • Will students have their own devices to vote/chat/interact?
    • If not, will the teacher/host be able to vote/chat?
    • Can a classroom mic be left on to enable two way verbal communication? Do you want this?!

What functionality do you need from the event software?

See the page on online event software, but make sure you know about the following questions - the answers to some of these may be dictated by safeguarding policies, so you'll need to ask ahead to plan what you'll do:

  • Text chat
    • Do you need to be able to turn it on and off?
    • Can *someone* (a host?) turn it on or off?
    • Does the chat need to be public/private?
    • Do you need to share a link for some resource with attendees?
  • Q&A (often different to a free chat, this is a way of submitting questions to a moderator)
    • Who manages this/selects questions to ask the presenter?
    • Who will answer questions, and how - through the chat, or on mic?
  • Shared Screen
    • Who can share their screen? (You probably want it to be just you!)
    • Can audience annotate a shared screen? (Turn it off if you don't need it!)
    • If you can’t share screen (or it breaks), do you have an alternative? (video-mixer e.g. OBS?)

What happens if something goes wrong?

  • Lost connection or audio/video fail
    • Can a second presenter pick up the slack?
    • Do they have a copy of slides/other material?
  • What will you do if a key interactive element fails (chat fails, Mentimeter goes down)?

Useful Production Options/Advice

Video Mixing Software

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS - open-source and free) or ManyCam (limited version is free, otherwise paid-for) are examples of software which will allow you extremely useful flexibility over your video (and audio) output that you send to an online event/meeting.

Think of them as a module which sits between your computer and the event software (e.g. Zoom) which lets you choose what video you send.

For example, you could send:

  • just your webcam
  • your webcam in the corner of a live presentation
  • a timer superimposed on your webcam
  • a live webpage
  • a spinning semi-transparent dodecahedron, with the words "Back Soon". [yes, I have done this]

For more information and details, read the handout on Video Mixing Software.

Any software takes time to get used to, but learning to use these effectively is one of the best ways to "take back control" of what your audience gets to see in an online situation.

General advice

Think about production values - how does what you’re doing come across?

  • Do we really need to see you clicking around on your desktop?
  • Can you hide your bookmark bar? Chrome extensions like 'open this tab as a popup window' can be useful for a clean screen share
  • If you screen share Powerpoint, run the presentation in a window (windowed mode, in the Setup Slideshow menu) and share that window, so we don’t see the software running around it. Alternatively, use a second monitor and share the screen on that - then you can run presenter view elsewhere.
  • Do you have a way to jump to a particular slide if you need to skip some content? This might involve stopping your screen share and talking to camera for a bit, or using Presenter View in Powerpoint/Keynote.
  • If sharing a YouTube video, playing the video in ‘cinema mode’ looks cleaner.
  • Can you test it out with someone else watching to say what they see on screen?
  • If you’re waiting for something to load (like screen sharing, or a web page) can you use the ‘dead’ time for introduction/explanation rather than silence?

links