When a European Commissioner travels, the visit rarely happens in one place. There is a meeting in the morning, a site visit at midday and an encounter with the public in the afternoon, each in a different part of the city and each needing to reach audiences across Europe the same day. On 22 and 23 October, our Prague team covered exactly that kind of programme for the European Commission, following Hadja Lahbib, Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, on her visit to the Czech capital.
The footage is now available through the Commission's own audiovisual service, and three of the pieces have joined our portfolio.
The programme brought together three very different settings. At a roundtable with civil society organisations, the Commissioner discussed equality with the people who work on it every day. At the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial, she paid tribute to the Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. And at a rehearsal of The Tap Tap, Prague's celebrated band of musicians with physical disabilities, the visit turned to music, inclusion and what it means to take part fully in public life.
Each setting asked something different of the crew. A roundtable needs clean, multi-speaker sound and discreet camera positions that do not disturb the conversation. A memorial calls for restraint: steady framing, natural light and an understanding of when not to move. A music rehearsal is the opposite, full of energy and movement, where the challenge is to capture performance and emotion without getting in the way of the musicians.
Working for the European institutions is a discipline of its own. Footage has to meet broadcast standards because it will be used by newsrooms across the Union. It has to be delivered quickly, often within hours, so that it can be edited, subtitled and made available to journalists while the story is still current. And it has to respect protocol, security arrangements and the dignity of the people and places being filmed.
Our crews have built that experience over many years of covering the work of the Commission and the European Parliament, from Brussels and Strasbourg to official visits in Czechia, Singapore and beyond. With LiveU live transmission in the kit, we can also send pictures straight from the location when a visit needs to reach audiences in real time.
Prague is our home base, and that makes a difference on a day like this. A local team knows the venues, the access routes and the timing of a city that is busy at every hour. It can move between locations without losing time, handle last-minute changes to a programme with ease, and work comfortably in Czech, English and the other languages a European visit tends to bring with it.
The same principle applies across our network of crews in 49 countries: people who know the ground, ready to work to the standards of the institutions and broadcasters they serve.
Planning an official visit, an institutional event or a press programme that needs professional coverage? Get in touch with our team or explore our services.
