Sydney Energy Forum: Hosting world powers in Sydney to build secure clean energy supply chains

PM&C ran the production. Brand Rebellion led on communications and event design. We came in as the creative partner: the films, the photography, the animations projected onto the walls of the Fullerton Hotel, and the design suite that ran from the invitation pack through to the place cards and the thank-you notes. The brief on the films was simple to describe and harder to deliver, make content that would play to the 300 delegates at this intergovernmental forum inside the Fullerton ballroom, get picked up by international media that wasn’t in the room, and continue being useful to partner governments after the delegates had flown home.

The federal election had been on 21 May. The work was contracted under the Morrison government and delivered under the Albanese government. That’s the “election period” most people don’t think about when they hear the phrase. Not caretaker conventions. A wholesale change of political messaging direction in the middle of an eight-week creative job. The brief had been written for Angus Taylor’s energy portfolio and ended up serving Chris Bowen’s. The story Australia wanted to tell about itself shifted between week one and week four, and the talent who’d been briefed under one government’s framing were interviewed under another’s.

Andrew Forrest sat for a camera in London talking about Fortescue replacing its diesel mining fleet with hydrogen fuel cells:

“If we’re spending all this money on fossil fuel and we’re just smoking it, we’re just wasting it, why don’t we take that money and put it into capital where we can make our own fuels?”

Larry Marshall, the CSIRO chief executive, did his interview a few days later on Australia’s competitive position in a carbon-efficient export economy. Martin Green at UNSW talked in front of the rooftop array that was the first commercial install of his PERC photovoltaic cell:

That’s the PERC cell technology that now accounts for over 90% of the global manufacturing.

Yoshinori Kanehana, the chairman of Kawasaki, did his in Kobe Port on Suiso Frontier, the world-first liquefied hydrogen carrier Kawasaki had built with Australian and Japanese government support. Shoichiro Watanabe, the CTO of Panasonic Energy, did his in Osaka on the supply chain mismatch sitting underneath the battery transition:

“It takes about a year to build a gigafactory. It takes between five and ten years to bring new resource materials into the market through a mining operation.”

Audrey Zibelman, then at Google’s moonshot factory, did hers in San Francisco on grid digitisation. The rest of the slate filled out across Paris, London, New Delhi and Sydney. Each international shoot was organised through the principal’s office and the relevant Australian post.

The window for all of this was eight weeks.

A global film series of this scope, shot to broadcast standards, with twelve-plus interviews of people who don’t have spare days in their diaries, would normally take four to six months. The brief had eight. Most of why it worked was structural: parallel regional capture units, pre-cleared technical specs, a single editorial through-line so that distinct shoots could be cut into films that felt like one body of work. Some of it was just calling people who said yes faster than expected.

The forum opened on the evening of 12 July with a song commissioned for the occasion, performed by the Gondwana Choir. Outside the ballroom, the Sydney Energy Forum identity ran as projection-mapped animation across the Fullerton’s sandstone facade which was run by AV partner, Sidestage. The hotel was built in the 1890s as Sydney’s General Post Office; the building had spent its first century as the communications spine of the city. Using it as the projection surface for an international communications forum was the kind of architectural rhyme that doesn’t need to be pointed out in the room.

The photography brief was to capture delegates as participants in a working summit, not posed dignitaries at a gala. The design suite, guest packs, menus, digital signage was built around a visual system that could move from heads-of-mission formality to working-session utility.

Four films played across the two days of the forum. The lead film was screened to Dr Alan Finkel, chair of the forum’s steering committee, former Chief Scientist of Australia, and the most senior technical figure on the programme, before it played to the delegates. He took the cut without notes. Bryden Campbell of Brand Rebellion talks about that moment in our case study video above:

“He hadn’t seen the video and we decided to play it on the big screen, and it received a standing ovation, and no edits, no changes were to be made. I’ve never seen that before in a video crew.”

The Australia–US Net Zero Technology Acceleration Partnership was signed live at the forum by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. The content went out as a broadcast-ready VNR pack to international newsdesks and kept circulating afterwards through IEA channels, partner government communications, and Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet digital platforms (captioned and audio-described to government accessibility standards, which is what gets you continuous reuse rather than a one-event lifecycle). The campaign tracked 20 million online media impressions globally