Behind the digital curtain — designing our Team ’21 virtual stage environment
Normally around this time of year, a handful of Atlassian Creative team members are emerging from the depths of an underground bunker beneath a convention hall in Las Vegas. No, this isn’t the opening scene of The Hangover 4, just some designers who have lost track of the days making final preparations for the big stage. Normally we’d be critiquing the shade of pink on a 10ft LED hexagon, or trying to synchronize the right 5-screen wide animation with the moment a speaker takes the stage. This year and last were disruptions to our regularly scheduled mole-people rituals. Instead, we had to find a way to bring the excitement of a 5,000 person auditorium to a laptop screen. Here’s how the Keynote and Power Session designers adapted our approach over the past 12 months to bring you this year’s show.
Remote Summit 2020
By the time we had switched to Remote Summit last year, there wasn’t enough time to revisit the presentation format. Geared up with our polished slide decks, we decided to lean into our limitations by simply acknowledging them head-on. After all, we weren’t the only ones scrambling to make every element of our lives remote-friendly and many of our peers were taking the same approach. For the most part, this approach was solid. The narratives were well-crafted and delivered, the graphics added plenty of meaning and delight. But from the visual design perspective, there was something missing. Obviously, the whole ‘auditorium filled with excited humans’ part was missing, but there was also an overall lack of formality that didn’t mimic the high production value of the onsite experience.
Exploring limitations
We identified early on that there were inherent pros and cons to our new limitations. Historically, slides have worked very well for sharing the big stage with a high-profile speaker and augmenting content in a beautiful way. However, in a remote experience, these two elements seem to be more competing than complimenting. The craft of the slides is reduced to a small portion of a browser window, and the viewer is disconnected from the speaker almost entirely. We wanted to find a way to bring back some energy using only the resources we had: webcams, ring lights, post-production motion graphics, and a timeline that didn’t allow for overthinking.
The new brief
Now that we were a few weeks into the apocalypse, there was a bit more inspiration floating around to see how other companies were adapting to the hellscape. The two examples shown below, NYT Diary of a Song and Facebook Connect were some that stood out in terms of engaging formats. Both of these examples dealt with subjects in different locations, both did away with standard 16:9 crops, both used a grid to break up the screen, and both used graphics to augment the content in a variety of ways that spanned from playful to serious. They felt like they had energy and high production value without the normal budget behind them.
New York Times: Diary of a Song
Facebook Connect (Oculus VR Conference)
As a quick thought exercise, we explored a variety of ways we might bring this approach to our brand language through the lens of an editorial content series. We knew that most videos would be DIY productions and there would be a wide range of quality across the video, so we leaned into the collage/mixed media look in order to accommodate this.
Investor Day 2020
We had a chance to put our ideas against a real script for Investor Day 2020. We developed a palette and set of graphic assets that gave the series a cohesiveness that felt considered and high [enough]-production value but also scrappy enough to afford us the DIY-looking video production of the speakers.
This format solved many problems while of course introducing a few new ones. The speaker video and graphics complement vs compete, but it required more planning, budget, and teammates with different skills. There was lower overhead for graphics once the style was chosen, but we didn’t get reusable slides as an output. And last, the graphics couldn’t be a crutch for storytelling during the writing process. This helped everyone focus on the words, but resulted in a video that was too long and had to be cut back dramatically during editing and resulted in a lot of design changes during animation which isn’t ideal.
Team’21
All of these learnings led up to the execution that you saw during Team‘21! We knew that we’d be upping the production value yet again with Team’21 but we were excited to learn from our events partner, Invision, that we would be compositing a 3D environment behind the speakers via green screen. This was the chosen approach by the events team due to the two studio environments (Mountain View and Sydney) and two speakers presenting from home. Our first order of business was deciding “where” we wanted our presenters to be — either a “real” environment like an office or public space, or a “fake” environment like a Tron- world.
Competitive audit
Apple, Twilio, AWS, and Spotify all used some level of compositing to create their experiences with varying degrees of success.
Apple
Apple chose to use their stores or amphitheater stages which worked well for them because of the iconic nature of these spaces. It actually didn’t feel too disruptive from their normal event.
Twilio
Twilio didn’t even attempt to hold back with the green screen. It was almost a character in their show, regularly shapeshifting and revealing itself to be the illusion that it is!
AWS
AWS stuck with the classic humble speaker and their slides. There were no illusions here, just a simple black box treatment that felt cohesive but a bit devoid of texture for our brand.
Spotify
Spotify one-upped everyone by filming in famous recording studios around the world. While they didn’t have a green screen, they did use a sculptural object on stage to help transition between live-action and full-screen graphic take-overs.
Masterclass
When we looked beyond what was happening in the tech space, we were able to appreciate some other details that could help bring back the vibe of Summit, like RuPaul’s Masterclass and its use of colorful neon to bring warmth and energy into the space.
Setting the scene
We originally looked at both residential and commercial spaces but struggled to find just the right fit. We loved how relevant Spotify’s filming locations were to their brand, so it made perfect sense for us to take inspiration from our very own offices which are filled with plenty of innovative collaboration spaces for teams to work in different ways. That flexibility and encouragement around collaboration is uniquely Atlassian and something that actually can be showcased through our environments, so why not use that as a starting point? We took that idea plus the Team’21 brand into our final mood board which, helped convey our intention to the 3D artist.
Lights! Furniture! Staging!
After settling on the general aesthetic, we started to think through the practicalities of the background and foreground elements. We’d need the background to be simple enough to layer graphics onto it, but interesting enough so it wouldn't look empty or boring during a monologue. We needed it to feel dark enough to accommodate text, but not too moody or unfriendly. We also needed our speakers to conference remotely with guests via Zoom, so some kind of interface would be a necessary prop.
It was clear from our inspiration that lighting would play a huge role in shaping the atmosphere of the space. It was critical because it was the only thing we could actually control, so we made sure to call out all of the subtle ways we wanted to see it—from practical background lighting to spotlights on the speaker.
We got to shop for furniture on company time to pull some prop inspiration. The artist took that inspiration and sourced hundreds of CG prop options from which we made our final selections. Here are a few snapshots from along the way:
Bringing it all together with graphics
Meanwhile, we developed the foreground elements which would be supporting the keynote narrative, either via text and graphic overlays superimposed over the speaker or in full-screen take-overs. We created a kit of parts in Figma which allowed designers to work on their individual stories with the same pieces. We also put together a motion sampler to help the agency get a sense of the finer details within transitions and hopefully save some time in the animation process, as we knew we’d be down to the wire.
Our storyboards were created using screenshots from the Spotify Stream On event because they used the same types of camera shots we hoped to use and had the dark background that was out of focus enough to act as a proxy for our final 3D background (sorry and thanks Spotify). As we finalized content, the script stayed in Confluence and was eventually loaded into a teleprompter. The presenters got to work in the studio and we were able to finalize the storyboards with the real shots, timestamps, and final tweaks.
The Team’21 branding was the primary driver for our choices around color palette and light effects.
While this article gives you a snapshot of the final product, you can register for the free on-demand experience to see these presentations in their entirety.
So… back to slides next year?
We’re excited about how the new format pushed us creatively. It was a totally different experience, but our hope is that we’ve highlighted the best that this format has to offer.
We’re curious about what should transfer back to live events in the next few years. Should we move on from slides in the long term? How will we make live events more remote-friendly even when we are back to ‘normal’? What observations have you made while going through the virtual event circuit in the past 14 months? Even though we’ll be back in Vegas next year, we’re excited to build on all of these learnings, so let us know what you think & hopefully, we’ll see you at Team22!
Special thanks to the talented folks who made it happen:
Event branding, design, and user experience: Deborah Lao & Robert Shabazz
Design and motion: Kimball Denetso, Diana Corredin, Phil Wong, Sascha Hopson, Rose Yount, and Brandon Jacobs
Animation: Rough House and Invision
3D: Rough House
Event production: Invision
