The Story
Organised by the National Arts Council, the multi-lingual Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) celebrates thoughtful discussion, a love for stories, and encourages intercultural dialogue by bringing together writers, thinkers and participants from Singapore and overseas.
Due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, this year’s festival – its 23rd edition – was presented digitally through broadcasting of live and pre-recorded content from The Arts House to festival-goers at home – the first-ever digital edition.
It was our honour to be selected to manage and coordinate all programmes for broadcasting onto SISTIC Live – SWF’s broadcast platform partner and Facebook Live – for festival-goers tuning in from their homes. Among the programmes we had to run was livestreaming with all speakers on-site, livestreaming with all speakers on Zoom and streaming of pre-recorded videos.
To do this, we converted four rooms in The Arts House into production sets for livestreaming. We designed and fabricated the backdrops of each set, utilised furniture from around the building, and even brought in our own furnishings.
As the theme of this year’s festival was “intimacy”, the set was arranged to have a look and feel of a homely environment. These production sets were only used when there were guest speakers on-site. We also ensured compliance to the SG SafeEvent Standard, with furniture being disinfected after every use and speakers were seated apart for social distancing.
Overall, our role was to oversee and manage the production and AV crew along with other operations and logistics required for SWF in accordance with the tight programme schedule where programmes were presented back-to-back.
