The Back-up Plan

SHOT: March 25, 2011
BACKUP FOR LIVE EVENT: March 29, 2011


It’s pretty standard practice – when a company plans a webcam hook-up at a live event – to have a back-up plan.

In this instance, Serials Solutions was announcing that Hathi Trust had chosen their Summon™ web-discovery service to enable students and faculty to search of a collection of more than 8.4 million volumes of digitized scholarly works. Hathi Trust’s executive director, John Wilkin, was to speak via Skype to an audience at a trade show reception in Philadelphia. Just in case, this pre-recorded version was on standby.

This was my backup plan: a few unscripted takes while we got the teleprompter up and running. John thought he was rehearsing – so did we. Ultimately, technology wasn’t on our side and we never got the prompter online, but we were able to edit John’s comments into a three-minute piece that could also serve as a freestanding video for Serials Solutions.