About the project
BBC Culture approached PPM to produce, direct and edit a series of intimate interviews with famous authors at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Presenter Hephzibah Anderson spoke to four well-known authors in front of a live audience inside the historic 'Lesezelt' tent.
The series was broadcast on BBC World News and published online at bbc.com/culture
Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende: ‘I could never make love in English’
How PPM made this series a success
Frankfurt is home to the world's largest book fair - where stage time is extremely scarce.
We had less than half and hour to transform an unlit location into a stage suitable for BBC World News' international audience.
Working with crews from the UK and Germany, we successfully produced four interviews with high-profile authors in just an hour.
The videos generated news lines for BBC Culture and we finished the edit on site so that the videos could be published the same day.
The project's success was a testament to our philosophy of careful planning to fuse high-quality live audience events with video production and newsroom deadlines.
Isabel Allende
Ken Follett
Eka Kurniawan
Charlotte Roche
Click below to watch the interviews on BBC Culture:
“Somewhere deep inside me there’s a song-and-dance man”
"I could never make love in English"
Indonesia’s most exciting author
"I don’t like taboos in sexuality"
Main photograph: Copyright Alexander Heimann/Frankfurter Buchmesse
