Since moving to the midwest I have been traveling to some very cool and interesting places for my job, and these past 5 months have been no different. So far this year I have been to Argentina, Barcelona, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Sorrento. The trips to San Francisco and Albuquerque were a little unique for me as they were the first jobs I’ve done in the United States since 2008. It was nice having people work for me who spoke the same language. That’s not to say I haven’t been doing other work in the US, but I haven’t been traveling in the US for work, just doing local (Chicago area) events.
By far the most interesting of these trips were Barcelona in March, and Sorrento, Italy, which was in May. The Barcelona job was a large undertaking as we were doing full meetings in two different hotels, as well as supporting a full band at an off-site dinner event. This whole thing was made more complicated because we were originally supposed to have these meetings in Cairo, but with the winds of change blowing through Egypt we had to find new space – hence two properties.
This meeting was easily one of the larger undertakings for me since working at my present company. Along with having to design and oversee meetings at two different properties, the second, and larger of the two, required that the General Session room be broken up into three smaller breakout meetings. To do this the set had to accommodate the ballroom airwalls being able to move into place.
Here is a picture of the full set.
And this is a straight-on view of just the center section.
You may notice that the squares on the set changed color, that is because they were little video displays tied together that we could play animated content on to give the set a bit of a dynamic look during presentations, and we changed colors to give the set a slightly different feel for different presenters.
What is hard to see in these pictures is how the top of the set is not a straight line, but instead curves up down like a wave, similar to the white vertical pieces. The screens are also surrounded by pieces that are curvy. This was an attempt to reflect some of the style of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi with the set.
The white vertical panels flanking the stage served a second purpose for us – in addition to adding some more curves to the set, these panels also could be removed to allow the ballroom airwalls to pass through the set so that the room could be divided into sections. The way that the meetings were timed, we had a total of 30 minutes to get everyone out of the room, split it into sections, and set the three separate rooms so that they could run independently with audio and video for their own meetings. We then had 30 minutes to reverse the process and combine the three rooms back into one meeting room.
Here is a view of the full room and then how it looked when separated into the three individual meeting spaces.
Designing this was no simple task, but getting it all on paper in a way that could be understood by people who I had not worked with before was even more of a challenge. Here is the full scope of the drawings needed to accomplish this one room.
These events are always a challenge, and I am most nervous the night before we begin set up as I am never truly sure that things will fit and line up properly until it’s all built and done. Fortunately this set went in just perfectly, and as you can see from the render on the last page of the plans above, came together pretty much as planned.
After this undertaking my next large event was the Sorrento job. This was a unique one for me as the hotel we went to had a full theater which we were setting up in. This simplified many things for me, not the least of which was not having to draw and determine the seating layout, rigging points, speaker and lighting positions, etc. But it left me a little uneasy, as to achieve this result…
I only had to do this much design work…
Three pages! I had to keep going back to this to be sure I had included everything I needed, but it really was this simple doing a build in an actual theater space. The set itself is much simpler as well, being all straight lines with no flourishes, but still I was concerned before our arrival.
The good news is that this set worked out just fine as well, and all were happy with the results.
Of these two locations, I had been to Barcelona twice before, so I did not take too many pictures of the area. But this was my first trip to Italy, and Sorrento was very picturesque, so be sure to check out some of the photos.
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