Conference Craft Create the UCLH Celebrating Excellence Awards
For the second year now, Conference Craft have been involved with the ‘Celebrating Excellence Awards’ for UCLH, providing conference equipment hire. The Celebrating Excellence Awards were set up to acknowledge members of hospital staff who go above and beyond the call of duty. The prizes range from the Kindness Award through to the award for Contribution to World-Class Research, and the competition was fierce, albeit well-behaved.
The awards were staged in the Prince Consort rooms of the Honourable Artillery Company’s venue in the City of London. For this event, we were once again working in partnership with Judge Events, a London-based event management company.
Set Design
Before the attendees even got to the main room, they encountered some Conference Craft magic in the form of LED uplights which lent some atmosphere to the pre-dinner drink and reception area.
For the stage, we used a black backdrop studded with LED ‘stars’ and this was complemented by four uplit, stretched-lycra sails. Together, the different elements gave a 3D effect to the stage.
The projection screen and the projector were flown on trusses and we used two plasma screens as repeaters half-way down the hall ensuring that everyone had a good view.
Lighting
This event was a good opportunity to show how lighting can really bring a room to life. Aside from the coloured uplights on the stage, we used moving headlights to add energy and make the set more dynamic. The headlights were equipped with standard gobos but we also produced custom gobos featuring the Celebrating Excellence Awards logo, which reinforced the branding.
Further down the hall, we placed more uplights on the (very convenient) shelf which ran the whole way along the wall. Being able to use this shelf left the floor space clear – a big plus for everyone!
Content
The Ceremony itself required a PowerPoint presentation. Using content supplied by the organisers, we put together a coherent and interesting demonstration that matched the tone of the event.
We also got the chance to use a new toy!
We have recently invested in Q-Lab 3, a live show control software package from top developers, Figure 53. The software allowed us to queue video and other media in a very efficient and user-friendly way.
The software was run on an Apple Mac mini, bought specifically for the purpose and used in conjunction with a Matrox 3-way graphics card. The graphics card is a powerful piece of kit which, among other things, allows us to display media from three separate sources on three separate screens.
Combined, this whole system opens up the possibilities and allows us to easily perform tasks which might otherwise be complicated and time-consuming.
All-in-all, the Celebrating Excellence Awards was a great event for everyone involved and we were in and out in a day. Aside from our super-human efficiency, our other strengths didn’t go unnoticed:
“A big thank you to you and the team for Thursday evening. We’ve received so many lovely comments from our guests with lots commenting on the professionalism of the production. The photos have come back in and the staging/lighting looks great in them. I was able to sit back and pay attention this year and it looked amazing!
We’ve also had a request for the track list, as the music went down well too.
Please pass on my thanks to the team, it’s been lovely to work with you and I appreciate how accommodating you have been with our requests.”
-Senior HR Business Partner