Conference
Hearth Summit
The organiser wanted delegates to leave having seen themselves in the story. A cinematic 90-second reel cut on-site and screened in the closing plenary, daily press-ready highlights.
Hearth Summit
Nairobi, Kenya
2-day festival
CLIENT
LOCATION
FORMAT
02
The brief
The organiser came in with one clear idea rather than a shot list: delegates should leave the summit having already seen themselves in its story. Not a film arriving in an inbox three weeks later, once the group has dispersed and the momentum has gone — the story shown back to the room while everyone was still in it.
That turned a creative brief into a production constraint. A film cut, graded and screened at the closing plenary means the edit runs while the material is still being shot, against a deadline that sits on someone else's run sheet. There is no version of that day where a render finishes late.
Running underneath it, a second requirement: daily picture highlights, delivered and catalogued session by session and day by day, so the organiser's team could publish during the event and find anything they needed afterwards without hunting.
The approach.
02
We worked backwards from the closing plenary. The film was assembled across the summit rather than after it — each day's material selected, cut and folded into a running edit that was always close to deliverable, so the final day was an edit being finished rather than an edit being started.
Alongside it, the daily rhythm. Picture highlights were delivered every day and catalogued as they were captured, by session and by day, which is how an organiser's team actually searches — by the session that happened, not the folder it landed in. Nothing waited for a post-event cull.
The post-event film came afterwards, cut without a clock on it. Same event, different job: the closing film was for the people in the room, this one for everyone who wasn't.
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The outcome.
03
The film played in the closing plenary, on time, to a room that had not yet gone home. Delegates watched the summit back with the people they had spent it with, and left having already seen themselves in the story — which was the whole of the ask.
The daily highlights kept the summit visible while it was still running, and the per-session catalogue meant the organiser's team could pull material by session long after the venue was packed down. The post-event film carried it further out, to partners, funders and everyone who never made it into the room.
2
Summit days
15+
Sessions Catalogued
3
Videos Delivered
04
Delivered.
Closing film — cut, graded and screened in the plenary
Post-event film
Daily picture highlights, delivered same day
Full catalogue, indexed by session and by day