Documenting Hemp Connect Forum 2025

Some events you cover with a highlight reel and call it done. Hemp Connect Forum 2025 wasn’t one of those. There was too much worth keeping.

Hosted by the Australian Hemp Council at La Trobe University, Hemp Connect brought business pitches, expert interviews and full speaker sessions under one roof in a single day. Rather than picking a handful of moments to capture, we documented almost the entire event. Every pitch, most of the interviews, and every major speaker session. And built the coverage into three purpose-built playlists.

The three-playlist structure

Business Pitches — Four founders and innovators pitching hemp products, materials and solutions, including Chris Ball and Harrison Marsh of Otetto, Leigh Fletcher of Murray Industrial Hemp(MIH), and Alfred C. Wheeler of Zeoform.

Interviews — Six behind-the-scenes conversations with speakers, exhibitors and attendees, from Dr Stuart Gordon of CSIRO to Tasmanian hemp farmer Tim Schmidt, capturing the informal, candid insight a formal stage session doesn’t give you.

Speaker Sessions — Six full-length presentations from the event’s expert line-up, produced for the Hemp Building Directory — including Kirstie Wulf on approvals for hempcrete buildings, Tom Ascroft of Standards Australia, and a joint session from La Trobe’s Dr Ernesto Valenzuela Dominguez and Prof David Fleming on hempcrete panels.

30 videos, three formats, one event.

Why document this much

Comprehensive coverage does something a single highlight reel can’t: it becomes a reference archive. Someone researching hempcrete approvals eighteen months from now doesn’t want a 90-second recap — they want Kirstie Wulf’s full session. Someone deciding whether to back a hemp materials startup wants the actual pitch, not a soundbite. And thats what happen with MIH who got a $10 million grant from the NSW government. Documenting nearly everything means the content keeps earning its keep long after the event ends, as evidenced by the CSIRO, Standards Australia and La Trobe sessions still surfacing in industry searches.

The sizzle reel

All of that raw material also gave us the ingredients for a proper highlights reel — the fast-paced, high-energy cut that captures the feeling of the day in a couple of minutes.

It’s the piece that gets shared. The archive is what keeps giving.

What this demonstrates

Full-event coverage isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t always the right call, but for a flagship industry event, where the speakers, research and pitches are themselves the drawcard, it’s a fundamentally different value proposition than three or four Shorts. It’s a searchable, citable record of the day, built once and referenced indefinitely.

If your event has multiple sessions, speakers or exhibitors worth capturing properly, this is the kind of pipeline we build around it.

More like this