Panel 01
Comms & Rocket Science — Building a Playbook for a New Industry
Christine Choi, M13 · Sarah Blask, Intersect
Axios
Mixing Board
Live
A full-day summit for the country's top communications leaders — captured, cut, and delivered as a 90-second narrative recap.
20+Speakers
7Panels
4Cameras
3Crew
90sRecap
The Project
Where the best communicators came to reckon with noise.
Axios Mixing Board Live brought together brand leaders, comms executives, and media innovators from companies like Walmart, OpenAI, Poppy, Dear Media, and Blue Origin on October 20, 2025 for a full day of conversation about what it means to communicate with clarity and humanity in an era of AI-generated noise.
Hen's Bread Productions was brought in to capture the day and turn it into something worth watching — not a highlight reel, but a single argument told in 90 seconds: the profession is changing, the community is ready, and the ground floor of AI belongs to communicators.
The client booked our Camera Van package — a 3-man crew with 4 cameras, fully loaded and ready to roll. No gear shuttles, no setup delays, no watching the clock. We arrived complete and stayed complete for the entire day. This is what event videography in Austin looks like at the production company level.
The edit follows a four-act structure built around a single emotional peak — Poppy co-founder Allison Ellsworth — with every other voice serving to set up or pay off that moment.
We don't have customers, we have community.
Allison Ellsworth · Co-Founder, PoppyAI awareness has increased 24%. AI fluency has increased just 4% year over year.
Stephanie Tignore · Head of Engineering, GrammarlyThe public has a seat at the table. Who in the company is going to represent their perspective?
Dan Bartlett · EVP Corporate Affairs, WalmartWe are at the cusp of AI. Getting in on the ground floor — there's a lot of opportunity for communication professionals.
Eleanor Hawkins · Head of Communicators, Axios
Behind the Lens
Four cameras.
Four cameras.
Three crew. One van.
The crew — ready before doors open
400mm reach — speakers locked, crowd clear
Working the room without being in it
Pre-Production
We walked the room before we walked in the door.
Assembly Hall is a large, open venue. Before production day, we built a Gaussian splat scan of the space — a photorealistic 3D model that let us study the room's geometry, sightlines, and depth before a single camera was unboxed.
What we found changed our gear plan entirely. The room was bigger than it looked in reference photos, and the couch-style seating meant the audience would fill the entire floor — pushing any camera operator to the back wall to stay out of the frame.
A 70–200mm lens wasn't going to reach the stage from that distance. We made the call before arriving: 400mm glass on every camera position. On the day, it was the right decision. Speakers were locked, close, and clean — with a full room between us and the stage.
The takeaway
Pre-production isn't a formality. For events you can't reshoot, knowing the room in advance is the difference between footage that works and footage that doesn't.
Gaussian Splat · Assembly Hall, Austin TX
Interactive 3D scan captured during pre-production. Drag to explore the space as we saw it before the event.
Scope of Work
01
Camera Van Service
3-man crew, 4 cameras, fully loaded on-site from call time to wrap. No gear runs. No clock watching.
02
Full-Day Event Coverage
On-site capture across seven panels and fireside chats from doors open to closing remarks.
03
4-Camera Multi-Cam
Cinema-grade cameras covering stage, audience, B-roll, and a dedicated wide lock-off throughout.
04
Post-Production
Narrative edit, color grade, dialogue mix, and motion graphics across all deliverables.
05
90-Second Recap Edit
Structured narrative cut for social and Vimeo delivery — built around a four-act argument.
06
Text & Graphics
On-screen speaker IDs, pull quotes, and motion typography.
07
Vimeo Delivery
Color-graded, mixed, and exported — ready to publish on delivery. Same-week turnaround.
Voices in the RoomThe people
20 speakers · 7 panels
The people
behind the ideas.
Hosts
Eleanor Hawkins
Head of Communicators
Axios
Hosts
Roy Schwartz
Co-Founder
Axios Media & Axios HQ
Hosts
Sean Garrett
Co-Founder
Mixing Board
Space Comms
Christine Choi
Partner, Head of Brand Comms
M13 · fmr. Virgin Galactic
Space Comms
Sarah Blask
Head of Communications & Brand
Intersect · fmr. Blue Origin
AI & Data
Stephanie Tignore
Head of Engineering
Grammarly
AI & Data
Abby Looney
Harris Poll Initiative Lead
Harris Poll
AI & Data
Emily Inverso
Communications
Axios HQ
Dear Media
Lauren Bostic
Co-Founder & CEO
Dear Media
Dear Media
Michael Bostic
Co-Founder & CEO
Dear Media
Talent & Career
Jen Byrne
Founder
Merit Communications
Talent & Career
Brooke Kruger
Founder
KC Partners
Talent & Career
Gob Faried
Founder
Off The Record
Poppy
Allison Ellsworth
Co-Founder
Poppy · $2B Brand
Walmart
Dan Bartlett
EVP, Corporate Affairs
Walmart · fmr. White House
Trends 2026
Lindsay McCallum
Head of Developer & Product Comms
OpenAI
Trends 2026
Ryan Heath
Senior Advisor
Weber Shandwick
Trends 2026
Taylor Griffin
Head of Policy Communications
Block
Trends 2026
Kristen Culver
Founder & Principal
Common Thread Communications
Trends 2026
Hany Derzy
Principal & Founder
RedBull Strategies
Full Panel Recordings
Every conversation.
Every conversation.
Complete and delivered fast.
The recap tells the story of the day. These are the full sessions — every panel, uncut, edited and delivered the same week. For clients who flew in from out of town, that matters more than they expect.
Panel 02
AI, Work Slop & The Real Cost of Poor Communication
Stephanie Tignore, Grammarly · Abby Looney, Harris Poll · Emily Inverso, Axios HQ
Fireside 01
The New Talk Show — Building Dear Media into a Modern Media Empire
Lauren Bostic & Michael Bostic, Dear Media
Panel 03
The Skills You Need — Hiring, EQ, and the Communicator of the Future
Jen Byrne, Merit · Brooke Kruger, KC Partners · Gob Faried, Off The Record
Fireside 02
Community Is the New Commerce — How Poppy Became a $2 Billion Brand
Allison Ellsworth, Co-Founder, Poppy
Fireside 03
The Public Has a Seat at the Table — Corporate Affairs at Walmart Scale
Dan Bartlett, EVP Corporate Affairs, Walmart
Panel 04
What's Next — Comms Trends, New Media, and the AI Opportunity in 2026
Kristen Culver · Hany Derzy · Ryan Heath · Taylor Griffin · Lindsay McCallum, OpenAI
Why This Matters for Your Event
The footage doesn't do you any good on a plane.
Most clients coming into Austin for a corporate event want their footage fast. That's a reasonable ask — and one that gets complicated the moment the event ends and everyone boards a flight home.
Here's what actually happens: the raw drive gets handed off at the airport, lands at an editor's desk two days later, and a project that should have taken a week turns into three. Or the client's internal team tries to cut it themselves on the road and it shows.
For Axios on October 20, 2025, all seven full panel discussions were edited, color graded, and delivered via Vimeo the same week — alongside the 90-second recap. The client had everything they needed before they'd finished unpacking.
That's not luck. It's what happens when you hire the crew that filmed it to edit it. We know every angle, every take, every hot mic moment. We don't need a handoff meeting. We were there.
Want the full breakdown? We wrote about it.
What It Takes to Cover a Full-Day Summit →
The reality of out-of-town events
Clients fly in, film all day, fly home. The raw footage travels with them — or gets transferred on a drive that takes days to land at their editor. By the time editing starts, momentum is gone and the event feels old.
What we do differently
We film it and we edit it. No handoff, no context lost in translation. We build the edit plan before production day so the moment we wrap, we know exactly what we're cutting. Turnaround is measured in days, not weeks.
The Camera Van — clock optional
This client booked our Camera Van package: a 3-man crew, 4 cameras, fully loaded and self-contained. The moment we parked, we were working. No gear pickups, no missing cables, no coordinating a second truck. When the van shows up, the job is already started.
When the van shows up, the clock stops mattering.
Plan A, B, and C — before you need them
Every job we take gets a contingency plan built before we arrive on set — backup audio, redundant cards, alternate angles. Corporate events don't get second takes. We plan like they don't.
The question worth asking
When you're choosing between production companies for your Austin event, the question isn't just who can show up. It's who has done this enough times to know what goes wrong — and has already planned for it.
How We Worked
Edit first. Shoot everything.
A recap like this lives or dies in the edit room. Knowing the narrative structure before production day means we know exactly what we're hunting for — and nothing gets missed.
01
Narrative Mapping
Before we arrived on set, we identified the four-act structure the recap would follow — open on community, establish the tension, peak on Allison, land on the vision.
02
Venue Scouting via Gaussian Splat
We scanned Assembly Hall before arriving. The 3D model revealed the room was too large for 70–200mm glass — we arrived with 400mm on every camera position. The room was packed. We stayed out of it.
03
Transcript-Driven Edit
Full-day transcripts reviewed and mapped to timestamps before the edit began. Every soundbite was chosen for its place in the argument, not just its quotability.
04
90-Second Discipline
The constraint was the creative. Everything that didn't serve the argument was cut. The result is a piece that earns every second of its runtime.
05
Delivery
Color graded, dialogue mixed, motion graphics added, and delivered via Vimeo — ready to publish the moment it landed in the client's inbox.
Bringing your corporate event
to Austin?
Hen's Bread Productions covers conferences, panels, and summits across Austin and Central Texas. Multi-camera, fast turnaround, full post-production. Jacob picks up — no voicemail, no runaround.