Brainstorm has been key in the virtual production and live streaming of last edition of the medArt Basel medical congress in Switzerland, that was carried out by production company Nominari.

medArt Basel is the largest medical congress in Switzerland. The Basel University Hospital started organising this convention, aimed at the German-speaking medical community 16 years ago. Since then, the congress has evolved from a 100% physical event to a mix of physical event and virtual platform based content and activities. With an average of 2000 professionals attending in person, this year the event had to go fully virtual if they wanted to celebrate it this time, due to the impossibility of hosting a physical event during the pandemic.

In order to achieve its goal, and only a few months before the date of the event, planned for May 5^th to the 7^th, the organisation got in touch with Nominari Schweiz GmbH, a production company that covers the entire area of video production, being the live streams the core business of the company. Taking into account the demanding expectations of the client, and that the auditorium where they have been hosting the congress does not look too good for a virtual live event, Nominari proposed them the option of deploying virtual production techniques to place the speakers on a virtual set, and the idea was most welcome by the hospital.

Set to providing the best results to the client, Nominari made a quick yet extensive market research and eventually reached out to Markus Wallies of ITcon4media, Brainstorm’s official reseller for the German-speaking region, who managed the request promptly and provided Nominari with a virtual production kit consisting of an InfinitySet 4 TrackFree turn-key solution and a three day long remote training imparted by a Brainstorm application specialist based in Madrid, both in record time.

With only three weeks to go, the organisation and Nominari worked back-to-back in conjunction with dedicated medical congress production agency Congrex, which has been producing the medArt Basel event for the last years, to go through all technical, programmatic and artistic aspects of the virtual production and live streaming of the event.

The basic technical set up to produce the congress consisted only of the InfinitySet connected to a track-free camera aiming at the moderators plus two more fixed cameras for other shots. The InfinitySet would mix the feed from the cameras as well as pre-recorded videos that would display full screen or on the videowalls of the virtual set, and inlayed it all in the virtual stage, all, of course, in real time. The virtual set recreated a location in the city of Amsterdam and for the interviews the interviewees, who participated from their homes, were tele-transported to the virtual set and the presenter could even freely walk around the set thanks to InfinitySet’s TrackFree functionality.

Thanks to having adopted the virtual form for this year, medArt Basel halved its overall production costs while they doubled the number of registrants of the previous years, reaching the 4000 attendee mark, since the registration fee could be dropped dramatically and attendees could also save on travel costs. When the event was done, a survey among the congress attendees revealed that most of them were so happy about this edition of the congress that they would like next year’s edition to be equally virtual.

The Basel University Hospital was also delighted for doubling the usual number of attendees as well as for the great visual and practical results achieved and how quick and easy was for Nominari to carry out the virtual production and streaming, that they are seriously considering the adoption of this virtual form for the congress for the years to come. For the same reasons, Congrex has also mentioned to Nominari that they are going to offer this new fully virtual way of hosting congresses to their client base of medical institutions all around the world that organise this kind of events.

“Our client was completely flashed, and at the end of the congress we were asked to come to the stage where the whole professor team of about 60 people applauded us for the job done. This was really special”, says Jens Lample, CEO of Nominari.