When I started doing our webcasts here at Lockheed Martin, it was pretty much in a meeting room somewhere with a couple of cameras and maybe lighting. And we were looking at how over the last couple of years, especially through COVID, trying to really scale our operations to strategically decide upon what we're gonna webcast. When we started out, pretty much any of our employees who wanted a webcast to communicate with mostly internal audiences could have one--you just had to request one. But we started looking at how we could increase the production value of those without necessarily increasing the budget. And so we started looking strategically at what type of communications need this type of event? Or can it be a Zoom or a Skype instead of a webcast?
So we started kind of drawing the line, and once we did that and we looked at just the strategic value of those events, we were able to then take the remaining budget and then look at increasing the overall quality of the production. And that's kind of what we've been doing the last couple of years--deciding, on our events that, that may not have strategic value, whether that's because of the type of presentation, the people talking, the information that's being conveyed, and then putting that into production value. So, multiple cameras. I have a, a couple of examples that, that I could share out on adding just simple things like additional lighting and then jib operators and essentially turning it into a little bit more of the type of show you might actually want to pay attention to.
And we found that we get longer audience viewing through that process. And based on the surveys that we send out, we're getting, we believe, a longer retention of that information because it is more interesting to watch. So that's probably the biggest thing that we're moving towards--just kind of deciding, what is the value of the piece that we're trying to do? And if it is definitely strategic value, giving it that extra production value. This is kind of a good example [that I'm sharing here]--a looping video, with just a jib operator. And this was shot during COVID, as you can kind of tell from the people who were there.
The other note that I wanted to make here is the venue that you see here. We had the opportunity during COVID to design some new employee spaces in some of our buildings, and we actually built production into them. You can kind of make out in some of these images, like up here in the areas around the top of the building, we have robotic lighting that's been put in, LED screens, audio. The camera operator that's back here actually has floor plugin so they can plug in directly into the system. And then we have a control booth that's just off to the right here that allows us to control all this from a single location. We worked directly with our facilities when they were going to revamp the space and said, "Let's make it a multi-use space. Let's make it a space that we can use for these types of presentations in the process and not be taping cables to floors and, and that type of thing."
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