Corporate · Awards · Audio · Video · Lighting · Effects
An awards night that moved outdoors for the band
An awards night that ends outdoors is two productions on one estimate. The room and the terrace share a client, a date and a running order, and almost nothing else — not the power, not the rigging, not the weather, and not the way sound behaves once there are no walls.
What we can actually tell you.
A company awards retreat, produced indoors and outdoors. The outdoor portion was a stage with a video wall behind it, audio, a lighting show and effects, built for a live band in the cocktail area.
- What it was
- A Myriad360 company awards retreat, in Orlando
- Where
- Indoors and outdoors — both ours
- The outdoor stage
- A video wall behind it
- Audio
- Ours
- Lighting
- A lighting show
- Effects
- Fog and cold sparks
- For
- A live band, in the outdoor cocktail area
Those lines are Dom's account of the job. Everything below is craft that is true of this work in general.
The outdoor half is its own production.
Same client, same night, same running order — and a different set of problems from the first word.
Myriad360 held its company awards retreat in Orlando across two spaces, and both halves were ours. An awards presentation indoors is a controlled space: known power, known rigging points, a ceiling that decides trim height, and walls that keep the sound where it was aimed. Move the second half of the evening outside and every one of those is gone at once.
That is why the outdoor portion gets scoped as its own job rather than as an extension of the indoor one. It needs its own power plan, its own structure to hang from, and its own coverage design — and it needs them decided early, because the two halves are built by one crew against one clock.
A live band changes the whole audio scope.
Channel count, monitoring and headroom are all decided by it.
A speech needs a microphone and intelligibility. A band needs inputs for every instrument, a monitor path so the players can hear each other, and enough headroom that the system is not working at its limit when the last song is loudest.
Outdoors that gets harder rather than easier. There is nothing to reinforce the low end and nothing to stop it travelling, so the design has to put energy on the cocktail area and as little as possible past it — which on a resort site is a neighbour question as much as a technical one.
Cold sparks and fog get agreed in advance.
With the venue, and usually with somebody holding a fire code.
Cold spark units and haze are the two effects most likely to be refused on the day, and for opposite reasons. Sparks look like pyrotechnics to anybody who has not seen one, which makes them a conversation with the venue and often with a fire marshal. Haze is what makes a lighting show visible at all, and it is also the thing most likely to find a smoke detector.
Both are arranged weeks ahead or they do not happen. An effects package that has not been cleared is not a package; it is a crate somebody paid to move twice.
The second half is built while the first one runs.
Which is a scheduling decision made long before the day.
An evening that moves from a room to a terrace has no interval long enough to build a stage in. The outdoor rig is standing before the indoor presentation starts, which means both were loaded in together and both are being covered by the same people at the same time.
That is the practical argument for one company carrying audio, video, lighting and effects across both halves: the crew that built the terrace knows what the room is doing, and nobody is waiting on a vendor who thinks their call time is later.