Recap

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Project Spotlight - 2024 AI Engineer World's Fair

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Talon Audio Visual was proud to support the biggest technical AI conference in San Francisco, the 2024 AI Engineer World's Fair. This marquee event brought together leading AI companies, founders, VPs, and engineers, featuring over 30 companies on the exhibit floor and more than 100 speakers delivering live talks and workshops to approximately 1,500 in-person attendees and thousands more online.

Talon Audio Visual provided technical production services and oversaw all audiovisual technology for the show. We also provided the Show Caller for the General Sessions and managed a team of a dozen breakout producers and over 40 union technicians and stagehands who covered 11 different rooms.

Challenges and Solutions

The project was daunting, requiring hundreds of hours of pre-production planning. Our production team faced several challenges, including multiple sessions, mid-show program changes, and unique tech needs. Here's how we tackled them:

  1. Managing Multiple Sessions: With 11 breakout sessions and a General Session that split and re-combined twice a day, keeping everything running smoothly was a significant task. We succeeded through careful planning and quick adjustments.

  1. Last-minute Changes: Our team handled numerous last-minute speaker changes and content updates. This required coordination between Talon, our partners, and the many producers and technicians. It also meant many live updates to the run-of-show. Our teams coordinated with presenters and producers to ensure seamless updates without disrupting the ongoing show.

  1. Specialty AV Needs: The tech-heavy show featured many live demos requiring rock-solid network connections, complex AV routing, and custom audio filters. Our team collaborated closely with speakers on their last-minute needs and handled these unique requirements with ease, ensuring every demo went off without a hitch.

Teamwork

The success of the event was a true team effort, involving:

  • Argus HD Event & Digital Productions: The AV team from Argus HD and their partners provided solid leadership and expertise.

  • IATSE Local 16: The union technicians and stagehands showcased their skills and dedication throughout the event, and made the show possible.

  • San Francisco Marriott Marquis: The Banquets and Event Services Teams at the Marquis were incredibly helpful, adjusting room setup and reset times, crew meals, and security schedules to support the production, and the in-house IT Team provided consistent network support throughout the event.

The entire production team managed the show and navigated challenges with confidence and grace. The AI Engineer World's Fair was a tremendous success, thanks to our team’s and our partners’ hard work and support. The event's complexity and scale pushed us all to grow, and demonstrated the strength of our teams. Together, we delivered an exceptional event and we are excited to deliver an even better show next year.

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Raising Funds and Ensuring Access - Captioning and Accessibility Consultation for Children's Miracle Network

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Tim is sitting in a dark backstage wearing a pair of headphones with blue earmuffs. In front of him are multiple laptop computers and screens powering the captioning system at the event.

When your mission is ensuring that 10 million children receive life saving hospital care each year, you have to sweat the small stuff. Details matter to Children’s Miracle Network, the nonprofit organization that raises funds for children's hospitals across the U.S. and Canada. Among those details are accessibility and equity, areas in the core focus of Talon Audio Visual’s Accessibility Consulting Services. In the Spring of 2023 Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals hosted their 2023 Hospital Week event in Sunny Orlando Florida, and reached out to Talon Audio Visual’s Talon Access Service to help ensure that the event was accessible to all their attendees.

A dark gray background, with the words “getting some good feedback on our accessibility Production Work“ centered across the top of the image. Below are two screenshots of chat messages from a captioner. The first reads “can you be our tech for all o

Part Telethon, part healthcare industry conference, with a dash of esports, and a live performance from Andy Grammer, it was quite the event. Talon AV / Talon Access provided live human-generated CART captions in the General Session, including for the live musical performance, along with Automatic Speech Recognition Captioning Support in the breakout sessions, and an event-wide accessibility review post-conference for the client and their production teams.

We got great feedback from the Children’s Miracle Network Team, as well as from our partners on the event, one of whom was so blown away she asked us if we could “be [the accessibility] techs for all of our conferences and events? You’re the first I’ve seen that TOTALLY gets what we need to do our job the best we absolutely can.”

At Children’s Hospital Week 2023, Talon AV helped make the great work of Children’s Miracle Network hospitals accessible to all. The positive feedback we received is a testament to Talon AV's expertise in providing comprehensive accessibility solutions.

At Talon Audio Visual, we understand the importance of sweating the small stuff to create meaningful experiences. We invite you to reach out to us for more information about our Talon Access accessibility consulting services. Let us help you ensure that your events are accessible to all, leaving a lasting impact on your audience. Reach out to us today for more information and let's work together towards a more inclusive world.

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AV With Pride - Recap of Davis Pride 2022

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As June comes to a close, I know we all have a lot on our minds, but I wanted to take a moment to look back and celebrate as we wrap up Pride Month. I know many large cities just celebrated their Pride festivals this past weekend. Here's a look back to a couple of weeks ago when Talon Audio Visual helped celebrate pride in Davis, CA. As an LGBTQIA-owned live events business, Talon Audio Visual has been proud to be the production partner for Davis Pride since 2015, and I look forward to many more years of a successful and growing festival. Hope you enjoy this look back at Davis Pride 2022. This video is #captioned

Thanks to Jolie Media for the great sizzle reel.

Video Description: A colorful review of the Davis Pride festival, this video opens with footage of the AV team setting up speakers and equipment and then transitions to colorful footage of the performers and audience at the festival. The video ends with Tim, dressed in black, speaking directly to the camera.

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2021 - Year In Review

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Wow. What a year. 2021 was quite journey, and I'm so thankful for the production partners, freelancers, and vendors who worked tirelessly this year to get productions off the ground.

And I am especially thankful to the clients who came to my little corner of the production world and shared my vision of what virtual and hybrid events could be.