An LSP member's view of this year's "The Special Event" in Chicago, IL.

LSP board member Steve Jaffe just got back from attending TSE, The Special Event, in Chicago and passed along these observations to share here on the LSP blog.

Having spent three full days at TSE, The Special Event, the buzz was all about the "How?". 

How do I promote what I do?

How can I do something I haven't done before?

How can we add "wow" to our events?

TSE draws a variety of attendees. From show veterans to those just finding a start, the conference and trade show offers plenty of ideas and information for anyone interested in finding the next big "wow" for their events.

The educational sessions drew capacity attendance with lots of great information being shared by a varied slate of industry professionals. The trade show floor boasted more than 300 exhibitors with displays and vendors representing products and services from linens to power support.

More specialized services like event insurance and custom app development found a place, and an interested audience, on the floor as well. A trend seems to be building for the use of social media and specialized apps, for promoting and sharing up-to-the-minute information on event details with event goers, organizers and production staffs.

Technology was also a big hit this year. Among many new technologies evident was the use of wireless lighting, including battery powered LED cans with remote capability. One area of the trade show floor featured a band staged under a lighting rig that was being controlled by attendees in the audience using iPads with a custom control app. No lighting or mix position required. Very impressive.

For those interested, the Gala award winners are scheduled to be posted on the event website at this link.

This year, the Chicago weather kept all of the activity indoors, yet the event still managed to draw more than 5,000 attendees. Next year's TSE is again scheduled for January and will be located in Nashville. A great event, well worth attending.

Steve Jaffe is a founding board member of the International Guild of Live Show Producers. Outside of his contributions to LSP, Steve is Manager of Business Development at Hertz Energy Services.

Logo and photo curtesy of TheSpecialEventShow.com.

A lesson from the Golden Globes: Less is More.

On January 13th, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association held their 70th annual Golden Globe Awards presentation at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in front of a celebrity packed ballroom and 19.7 million television viewers around the world.

You might think a prestigious awards ceremony, presented in front of an audience of millions, demands spectacle, cutting edge technologies and state-of-the-art bells and whistles. Think again.

In fact, the Golden Globes are noted for their modest setting, simple staging and lack of elaborate sets. The show is staged in a fairly standard ballroom with the most elaborate pieces of on-camera decor, outside of the evening gowns and star dental work, being the grand chandeliers that are a permanent fixture of the room.

Though there is added room decor in the ceilings and expensive table dressings, the staging remains, as it has for years, rather ordinary and straight forward. Visual variety is mostly achieved through color changes, moving panels and drops.

It's a point worth making when working with production designers and clients who may be over reaching their resources with a more grandiose vision than needed. Less can indeed be more in terms of properly fitting scale to purpose and budget to effect.

There's nothing wrong with designing and selling beautiful decor. Jaw-dropping decor for that matter. But it clearly isn't a requisite for delivering a great awards-style event. Elaborate sets and cutting edge tech aren't the show, they're enhancements, and often valued additions. But success of the show doesn't depend on budget blowing dazzle. More appropriately, it depends on conveying content.

Clearly and accurately engaging an audience in your client's message should be first and last on the list. Show producers can point to the annual Golden Globes production as a convincing example of how budget conscious clients can leverage smart spending and simple staging to deliver high caliber effect.

That is, unless spectacle for spectacle's sake is the soul of your show. Then by all means, have at it. No one ever used the adage that less is more at a Superbowl Halftime meeting.

The 70th Golden Globe Awards were produced by Dick Clark Productions and directed by Louis J. Horvitz. Images are courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC. 

Standards of Excellence

Defining excellence can be a vague and misleading thing. Who sets the standards you should follow? From manual or mentor? How are they measured and prioritized, and by which of the many facets of your responsibilities? Is there a clear scorecard or a standardized report to complete?

Obviously not. Yet excellence is what each of us strive for in the way we judge competency, credibility and, indeed, our own performance.

The International Guild of Live Show Producers was created in 2012 by a group of live show professionals with the goal to support, educate and accredit the working producers and support teams of the live show and event industries.

In an increasingly competitive field, facing a myriad of challenges encompassing the economy, breaking technologies, unions and work forces, rapidly evolving technical skills, escalating client and audience expectations, legal rights and obligations and practical matters like insurance, wages and safety, what weight should we assign to standards of excellence?

The LSP will, year in and year out, advocate for excellence within our profession. But we will look to you, the working producers who spend the days and weeks of each year, planning and executing an extraordinarily wide array of live shows and events, to help zero in on what excellence means. We will look to you to define for us what you see as excellence, and to join us in sharing those observations and experiences.

With this first post on our blog, we introduce the LSP Event Debrief. Call it LSP-ED, and think of the "ED" as short for EDucation. At first, LSP-EDs will appear here as columns dedicated to sharing our observations about achieving excellence in our profession. As our collective experiences evolve, we will expand our platform to include interviews and client observations, and extend our debriefings into other areas of quantifying the cause and effect of notable live show production.

We believe that standards of excellence evolve from a community of dedicated and driven professionals. A working community, through discussion, debate, analysis and reflection, can see a picture larger and more detailed than any of us can hope to achieve within our own arena of achievement.

Through an organization of like-minded members and interested professionals, the LSP will pool the experiences and opinions of a diverse network of live show producers that has never before found a common meeting place or a focused voice.

We urge you to join in the conversation. The door to this blog is not only open, it has been taken off the hinges. Through an already present array of online forums, LSP provides our members with multiple platforms to interact and network. The LSP blog will be unique in that we are inviting the entire event and live show community to actively participate, letting your presence be felt by commenting below each of our posts.

What are your standards of show excellence?

We'll be sharing your stories and ours, with the expectations that as quickly as we establish our measurements, one of you will find new ways to exceed them.

Thanks for dropping in. For more information about the LSP and our members you can follow this link: www.LiveShowProducers.org.

Jeff Rabouin
Executive Creative Director, LSP