Today’s show Jon talks about staging and scenic in some of the shows he has done in the past month.
Mike McAllen of Grass Shack Events & Media http://www.grassshackroad.com/
Jon Trask of Alliant Event Services http://www.alliantevents.com/
Transcripts:
John Trask: Hello and welcome back to the Meetings Podcast. We’ve been having a little challenge getting Mike and Tom and I all in the same place, so I’m going do a solo one today and it will give us a little bit of case study of a couple of things that I’ve just come up of doing, wanted to talk a bit about them on the Podcast. We’ll put some photos up on the Flicker account so that you kind the reference those photos and get a sense of what I’ve been up too over the past couple of months and basically what I’m doing here is I’m hoping that this will sparkler creativity for some of you, maybe for a things and ideas that you can take to your AV company or just innovative different ways to kind of approach meetings and trying give a different look or a different idea to a meeting room than the traditional sort of two screens and some pipe and drape.
So, I just came off of a run of about three shows. The first one was they were all pretty diverse actually. The first one was done for networking marketing company and it involved the fashion show because they sell a fashion product. So, we had kind of an interesting room to light because you’ve got a long runway and we ended up doing a fairly large box truss on that which I will provide some photos, so that you will see what I’m talking about but we have a 64 runway for a fashion show. So, there was a little extra lighting involved in doing this but the most interesting thing and we’ve reference it here on the Podcast before, is we did a little bit with boxes. I was able to put together kind of an interesting looking set out of effectively cardboard boxes. You put some lightning on them, you stock them and they look like large white cubes and it really that are creativity go pretty wide. We did – we did a relatively tame version but we talked about a number of different ways that this can be enhance and built upon.
So, just looking at that it’s – it’s one of those things that just sparked an idea at one point and we kind the said, “Hey this could work” and as we talked to the client about it, they went, “Yes you know you’re right, that could work” and so you can find sort of mending items or interesting items that you can occasionally repurpose into a meeting. In this case we consider it sort of a green technology because it’s a very recyclable product, so the entire set was built without using a big quantity of wood or paint or other materials like that. We simply took off the shelf stock white boxes and through some creative lighting and a little bit work we’re able to make a fairly cool looking set. It actually went over so well that I’ve sent out photos of it to folks like I’m going to be posting on a Podcast here and we were able to have a another client who’s going to be trying a similar thing based upon what they have seen.
So, the biggest thing there is just look around you for some other items and things that you can sort of repurpose into your meeting and maybe dress it up and give it a little bit different look from just the traditional pipe and drape and too screen kind of look that everybody still use too. The other really cool thing about this one was because it was a fashion show; we had audience on three sides of the stage. So, we had kind of interesting arrangement of screens as well. We had two screens at the front in the more traditional way but then we actually had screen going down each side facing the audience, so that as they look at the runway in their eye line directly behind the runway they would still have a screen. So – and that one we actually found a way, instead of just hanging the screen or standing the screen, we took a box truss like you would for a lighting tree and put some cross pipes on it and we hang the screen from it. So, what we effectively made it look like at least in my mind was a little bit like a large plasma monitor. It was like a 12 foot wide plasma monitor, it look like a stand with the screen on it.
And so again taking something that’s normally in the room like, say a lighting tree and just finding another way to dress it up and doing something a little bit different with it. It doesn’t cost a fortune but gives you a very different look on the room. The second show had some really interesting challenges, producer came to me with this particular look and what we did is we put a 34 foot wide screen as a back draft. He wanted effectively a television studio look in a very small ballroom, for only about a 150 people. So, we did a 34 foot wide screen, 10 feet high directly behind the 34 foot wide stage and like a talk show desk and sort of the traditional night time chat show look but because that screen was there we were able to put up a wide variety of back drafts and backgrounds and get really creativity and yet we did it with the single projector. We had to over shot a little bit, it wasn’t perfect resolution, it wasn’t exactly the way the book says to do it but the fact is instead of doing a blend, we did a huge wide screen, double stock 12,000 lumen projectors and made it work in that way.
And so again sort of repurposing things, knowing what the compromises are, working with your AV guys to find solutions, a lot of people would have sold that strictly as a blend show but we found a way around it in this economy. We made it work. It looked really sharp for the client. Hopefully you’ll see that, it will come out in the photos. We did some flanking screen that carry that important information and we set it at 45 degree angle to the room, so when the audience walked in everything was different. It wasn’t the normal room you would see because it was all in angle, which cost us quite honestly some time in rigging and I would definitely flag, if you’re going to do some of this different things, make sure you’re blocking out some time for pre-rig because it’s something that gets over looked in our side of things a lot and it really makes a huge difference to have your AV vendor staggered his crew a little bit, come in and hang the trusses and put the points in and do that work, so the remainder of the crew isn’t standing around. We found it to be much more economical to approach it in that way.
So, anyway this had a 34 foot wide screen, 10 feet high, a couple of flanking 7-1/2 by 10 screens, made a huge, huge impact, look really good for the client and the CEO of this client actually went to my producer and said, “This is the best looking room we’ve ever had” and it wasn’t on a huge budget. To be honest it really wasn’t that much more than just a regular two screen show would have been. Again we put together the package for them but you can find those sort of deals in this economy but look for ways to be innovative and look for ways to just try something different, cocking the room at the 45 degree angle, using a single projector but doing a large screen, some of those things can add some revalue to the meeting and add a very different look and engage the audience.
The last show was – was just a large ballroom show. It’s one that I’ve been working with this group for a number of years. I really love working with a great folks but a very high national profile. They have some very important political figure speaking at their meeting that we need to coordinate and one of the things that they have that’s particularly challenging but that we found the way to make work is their ballroom for their general session, configures and reconfigures a couple of times and again that’s that sort of thing we’re doing in this economy. We’re finding ways to make it work. So, we spend a lot of time on the front end of this, designing rig that would allow us to easily configure and reconfigure from four rooms to a single room.
And so it takes – it takes some thought to do that, it cost some extra cable, and cost some extra time but just a reminder that you know things are really possible if you put your mind to it and in this case the facility that we had, that was the particular space we had to work with. So, we just needed to find a way to make it work so that it could be both break out rooms and general session and be able to do that in a reasonable amount of time to turn it. So, we came out at that one feeling very good because at one flawless on the turns, we did some things like by audio engineer design a system. They could literally configure and reconfigure at the drop of a button, so he could take a mouse click. He could change it from being the configuration of four rooms down to being the configuration of a single general session with simply a little bit of software configuration and pre-planning.
So, once a gain like the pre-rig, spend some time on your pre-planning, talk to your vendor, talk to your event producer, your technical people and see if there are ways that maybe getting that ballroom a little bit earlier or spending a little bit more time on the front end, planning through some of this things. It will definitely save you money on the back end or it will give you a better product and a more functional product and something that just looks greater. So, I’m going to have photos of all three of these shows. I’m going to send them to Mike, we’ll get them up on – on the Flicker account but just wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of lessons that have come out of the last few months and an interesting time that we’ve had and please feel free to write us at Gmail, it’s MeetingsPodcast@gmail.com and we love your feedback, we look for any information, Mike and I and Tom and I, so we hope to hear from you and we look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.
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