From a plaza to eighty thousand people.
SALAAM EVENTS · 2022–2026
BC Halal Food Fest grew from a single afternoon in a Surrey plaza into one of Canada's largest summer festivals. Aflak Media has covered its last three editions — building the media system that carried it there.
CLIENT
Salaam Events
Videography · Photography · Drone/RPAS Coverage · Live Stage-to-LED Broadcast · Social Content
SCOPE
YEAR
2024 - 2026
DIVISION
Aflak Media
What we built, and why it mattered.
01 - OVERVIEW
Salaam Events
Cultural Festival Producer, Halal Food & Community Events
CLIENT
3 consecutive editions (2024–2026) · ~3 weeks pre-production · 3 days live · 2–3 week post-production cycle per edition
TIMELINE
Videography · Event Photography · Drone/RPAS Aerial Coverage · Live Stage-to-LED Broadcast · Social Reels · Sponsor & Press Content
SERVICES APPLIED
8-person Aflak crew per edition — 2 videographers, 1 photographer, 1 live-feed stage operator, 2 licensed drone/RPAS pilots, 2 post editors — on-site in Surrey, BC.
TEAM ON GROUND
BC Halal Food Fest began in 2022 as a single afternoon in Surrey Civic Plaza — a few thousand people, a handful of food stalls, one community finding each other in public. By 2026, it had become the Bill Reid Millennium Amphitheatre's headline summer event: three days, 50+ food and market vendors, a full carnival, a main stage, and a Saturday crowd pushing 70,000–80,000 people
Aflak Media has covered the festival's last three editions — 2024 through 2026 — as its lead media partner, arriving after the founders had already run it once informally, and staying on as Salaam Events formalized into the organization it is today. Each year the brief got larger: more vendors to reach, more stages to cover, more communities to represent honestly, all inside a single July weekend.
THE CHALLENGE
BC Halal Food Fest doesn't run like a typical brand shoot — it runs like a small city for three days. By 2026 the festival needed a media team that could cover a main stage, six vendor rows, a carnival, and sponsor activations simultaneously, produce two dozen-plus social-ready reels inside a live weekend, and still deliver a broadcast-standard three-day recap — without slowing a single vendor's line or missing a single stage cue. The real challenge was never any one camera position. It was building a crew system disciplined enough to be everywhere the festival was, at the exact moment it mattered, three years running
How we moved from brief to delivery.
02 - THE APPROACH
Three weeks out, Aflak locks the shot list before a single camera rolls — 26+ planned reels mapped to specific vendors, artists, and stage moments, drone flight plans filed and cleared through NAV Canada, and a full crew briefing covering the venue's vendor-row system. Nothing on-site is improvised; it's scheduled.
01
ROOT · PRE-PRODUCTION
Across three festival days, a eight-person crew — two videographers, a photographer, a live-feed stage operator, two licensed drone pilots and two post editors — covers the grounds in overlapping lanes: a locked stage broadcast feeding the LED screens live, roaming reels moving vendor to vendor, aerial coverage from sunset onward. A shoot-cull-dump cadence keeps the editor fed in near real time, so content ships while the festival is still running.
01
BLOOM · PRODUCTION
What comes back gets cut fast and cut clean: live reels published within hours, a full three-day recap film delivered within weeks, and a curated set of edited, color-graded photographs pulled from thousands of raw frames. Editorial restraint matters as much as speed — every vendor, performer, and community represented gets framed with the same care.
01
HARVEST · POST-PRODUCTION
Sponsor and vendor-specific cuts go out separately for their own channels, press-ready photography is delivered to media outlets covering the festival, and each year's recap film becomes the opening pitch for the next year's sponsors — proof, not just archive.
AMPLIFY · DISTRIBUTION
01
What the work produced, in numbers.
03 - THE RESULTS
80K+
Attendees reached across the festival weekend
$2.5M+
Total on-site vendor transactions recorded
90+
Countries of origin represented among attendees
5yrs
From a Surrey plaza to a 80,000-person weekend
What was produced.
04 - DELIVERABLES
MASTER RECAP FILM
FILM
4 cinematic 3-day recap films — one flagship highlight film delivered per festival edition (2024–2026)
LIVE EVENT REELS
SOCIAL
80+ real-time social reels shot, cut, and published across three editions, mapped to a pre-planned shot list of vendors, artists, and stage moments each year
EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTO
4,000+ curated, color-graded photographs across three editions — vendors, stage performances, sponsors, and crowd, delivered for marketing and archive use
PRESS & SPONSOR CONTENT
PRESS
Editorial-standard press photography plus dedicated sponsor and vendor highlight videos, delivered for media coverage and sponsor reporting
Aerial (Drone/RPAS) & Live Broadcast
CUSTOM
NAV Canada-authorized drone coverage and a live multi-camera stage feed pushed to on-site LED screens, across all three editions
PLANT THE FIRST SEED
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