Sightlines

A sightline is the line from a seated eye to the thing it is meant to see. Drawing those lines across a room, from the front row and from the back, is what settles several decisions that otherwise get made by guesswork.

The hardest room is the ordinary one: a flat ballroom floor with round tables. Every head blocks the head behind it, so the stage has to be high enough that the back rows see a standing presenter whole, and the bottom of any screen has to clear the heads in front of it — which in practice means keeping the lower edge of a screen several feet above the floor, not resting it on the deck. A screen that reaches the floor is a screen whose bottom third is only visible to the first few tables.

Raising the stage fixes the back of the room and spoils the front, because the first row ends up looking steeply upwards. Where both matter, the answer is usually a lower stage with screens lifted on their own structure rather than one tall stage.

Sightlines also decide what may be placed in the room at all. A camera platform, a followspot position, a delay loudspeaker on a stick and a lighting tower each block seats behind them, and each is cheaper to position on a drawing than to move once the room is set.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Riser A small raised platform for a specific thing — a drum kit, a camera, a choir, a panel — and almost always the piece that gets left off the drawing.
• Stage deck The modular platform a stage is built from — four feet by eight in most of the country, with the height set by the legs rather than by the deck.
• Thrust stage A stage that extends into the audience with seating on three sides — intimate, and a complete rewrite of where lighting, loudspeakers and cameras can go.