Injecting the ‘WOW’ factor into your live events

Often, we’re asked by our clients to inject the ‘WOW-factor’ into their live event using our audio visual technology expertise.

Communications objectives and budgets are different for every event, but here are some of our favourite ways to delight or surprise audiences using technology:

Hologauze by Holotronica

This semi-transparent silver thread screen can be projected upon to create an interactive and ethereal scenic layer between presenters, performers and their audience.

Paired with sensitive lighting, it’s captivating, impactful, and adds a sense of visual depth to any performance.

Virtual Reality by Microsoft HoloLens

These transparent VR glasses display interactive virtual media to users and enable the manipulation of 3D content in real-time via gesture control.

This technology is a truly stunning way to engage and educate that must be experienced to be believed.

Fog Screens

Fog and mist screens provide an interactive dramatic canvas for projected visual displays.

Utilised for impact in low lighting conditions, these tactile installations lend themselves perfectly to venue entrances and exits and offer a unique way to get audiences up close and personal with visual content.

“More is more” with lighting

We control the feel of event spaces with effective lighting design.

Our preference is to install many smaller units (rather than fewer larger ones). This allows us to inject more points of visual interest, choose from a broader colour palette and add greater tonal variety for audiences and brands.

Sound Signatures

Sound design is evocative. It adds a subconscious layer to a live experience.

We create ‘sound signatures’ for every event, infusing live experiences with their own audible identities. We can link walk-in & out soundtracks, experiential soundscapes, and post-production content together with stylistic audio hallmarks.

See how we create live events with ‘wow’ factor for our clients here or

Contact Us today to start collaborating with us to plan your next live event.

Top Photo Credit: Helena Lopes

Centre Photo Credit: Salah Alawadhi

Bottom Photo Credit: Roman Pohorecki

Immersion Room Dreams

Imagine being able to put yourself into any location at the touch of a button.

Our immersive projection rooms allow the user to envelop themselves within a real-time visual and auditory experience.

Rooms feature wall-to-wall projection, to fill the horizontal visual plane. Floors and ceilings can also be projection-mapped for a truly enveloping 360 degree experience.

You’re in control

Users choose interactive environmental scenes using a bespoke controller. Rolling green hills, sun-dappled woodland, warm beaches, deep caves, stunning mountain tops and wide savannahs are all available on demand.

Thanks to real time environment rendering software, users can modify scenes further, adding environmental elements such as gentle rain, peaceful snow and dramatic thunder. Even the time of day is changeable via a simple slider. Night becomes dawn, becomes day, becomes dusk to suit your mood.

Audio design is comprehensive and includes ambient soundscapes to suit, played back via a discreet PA system. Music and sound effects are optional; gentle waves, the sound of a stirring breeze or birdsong can be cued as desired.

If you’d like to know more, Contact Us.

Top Photo Credit: Akos Szabo

Current crewing concerns for the live events industry

The week of the 16^th May 2022 represented a “perfect storm” in relation to crewing live events across the country.

Our event

Neutrino Global prepared for weeks for a multi-day event hosting 350+ delegates. A company’s sales review conference, product launch and celebratory gala dinner awaited the lucky guests.

Preparations and liaisons with the events production company TMB Events progressed well; adjustments to initial plans to finesse the final production were integrated successfully.

Then, with only a couple of weeks to go, the event scope expanded significantly. For various reasons, the final gala dinner would now be held in a separate room to the main conference event. 

This was all manageable from a kit and staging point of view. The biggest snag for us on this job was now crewing.  We suddenly had to find more skilled crew with suitable availability at very short notice.

We’d tried a lot of our existing contacts and already booked several of them for the main room conference & product launch.  We contacted more than 50 other potential AV freelancers over several days but without success. Some had left the industry, some had retired but the majority were simply not available for the dates needed. Many told us they could have booked themselves work for that week several times over.

Eventually, using all our available industry contacts including the ‘Freelance Job Swap’ group on Facebook where over 6,000 skilled freelance events professionals are members, we were able to book all AV technicians needed. Their experience and professionalism was exactly what we needed for the event to be successful.

Why the shortage?

So what were the factors that contributed to this apparent drought of available skilled crew for this week?

• Live events could only to run in full again, without Covid restrictions from early 2022.  There were expectations across the industry that from early Q2 2022 onwards, live events would increase in number. People & businesses wanted to make the most of being able to reconnect in person after so long apart. It seems that these predictions were absolutely correct.

• A survey conducted by Plasa in Dec 2021 found that 69% of their respondents were already facing skills shortages. The vast majority of those shortages were for site & rigging crew, engineers and technicians. 74% of their respondents were also lacking in confidence about the improving in the following six months, up to mid-2022. 

• College and university graduates have had their training courses heavily curtailed due to the Covid restrictions across the past two years. The opportunities for them for meaningful and relevant work experience were simply not there.  This means that they are finishing their training courses this summer will little or no actual experience of live events. They may not yet be fully ready to take up roles in the live events industry.

How is this situation going to improve?

The live events industry is currently very much the place to be if you’re an experienced & capable events technician. Those freelancers who managed to survive the ‘famine’ of the last couple of years should now be able to make the most of the ‘feast’ of opportunities available to them. 

Agencies, businesses and venues of all types must offer opportunities for apprenticeships and work experience in all types of roles.  We need to bring more skills into the industry and share our experience with the next generation of audio visual enthusiasts. Organisations such as Event First Steps are essential if our industry is to fully flourish again in the future.

Events production companies such as ourselves need to be on the ball to make ourselves attractive to the freelancers available.  We need to continue to make the industry a desirable place to work overall and to ensure we are an appealing prospect as an individual company.

Reliable arrangements such as offering a 20% upfront payment of freelancer’s fees once a job is confirmed will help to keep us at the front of the line when freelancers are choosing which company to share their skills with.

We paid in full in fewer than 5 working days all the freelancers who worked for us on the live event and linked gala dinner.

It’s great to be busy again

The gala dinner was a huge success and thoroughly enjoyed by all, thanks to our team.  The 50+ freelancers we contacted but couldn’t use are now on our list of potential staff for future events. We’re now even better prepared to deliver further exciting and engaging live events. 

It’s wonderful for the events industry as a whole to be back at full capacity – long live live events!

Photo credit: Marc Shulte

Hybrid event solution

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Last year it was impossible to have a physical live event, so the online hybrid event solution was the only option.

However, we know how eager everyone is to get back in the room as there is nothing like being face-to-face with your colleagues, friends and fellow professionals.

As we go forward it is time to find the balance and go hybrid.

One of the most important factors to consider is that a hybrid event solution event will take the same, if not more, planning and preparation as an on-site event. It is not just about setting up a virtual streaming service – it’s one event with two simultaneous modes of delivery. If you want to educate, inform and celebrate with a wide and varied audience it could be the perfect solution.

To make this happen your event strategy will need to adapt, the change raises questions, some of which we have hopefully answered below.

A hybrid event solution might be a business decision

With the regularly changing rules and restrictions decisions have been made for us, however, the freedom remains to choose which venue and digital platforms best suit you.

A hybrid event solution might be a business decision, and an opportunity for your attendees to be involved.

Whether you have a section of your audience who can’t physically get to the event for safety and logistical reasons or the onsite location has capacity limits, by giving people choice they will see how important they are to you. Guest input provides data for the likely on-site numbers and how best to plan the agenda for maximum impact.

It might even be that before the pandemic you struggled to get all your executives in a room due to clashing diaries, let alone now. Having some participants attend in-person while streaming with the others could be the perfect option.

Maybe you feel it would be best to have an event where instead of getting everyone in one central space you set up local hubs and then each group virtually interacts with each other.

The choice is yours.

Connection through a hybrid event solution

By using virtual and cloud-based technologies alongside on-site sessions, you can ensure everyone stays connected to your message. Delegates still have the maximum opportunity to connect with each other, which means you are more likely to get higher attendance numbers and better post-event feedback.

Whether people want to connect face-to-face at a coffee break or in a breakout room, the success of an event can hinge on how you connect with the audience and give them options to interact. This is even more essential for hybrid events where you have different needs and engagement levels to manage simultaneously.

Creativity

Marketing and promotion of the hybrid event solution are even more important with hybrid as you will have audiences accessing content at different times and in different ways. Creativity is key, to foster pre-event engagement. For example being fluid in how you create the invites, or which platforms you use to host event info.

The joy of this new way of working is that it has broadened the options available to you. Whether 100% digital or completely physical – you could even have a hybrid approach to your event communications.

We can help you with the perfect technical production systems to kick off any event or brighten up even the most intense breakout room, by supplying the right people to make your ideas a reality.

Cost of an hybrid event

Hybrid events can be designed to meet any budget. Budgets have always been one of the biggest considerations for events, but the hybrid option gives you the chance to open up your audience creating better ROI and audience engagement.

Maybe it means that you have the winning sales team connect remotely whilst having their leader onsite or allow you to offer tiered pricing for an event to be on-site or online.

Saving money onsite might be exactly what you need to open up your event plans but always remember that with a partner like Neutrino we can chat through all the pros and cons to make sure the solution works for you.

Cooperation

You may have found that your events have worked really well virtually, so post-pandemic there will definitely still be a place for them, or you might have found people are asking when the real events will be back!

The great news is that we are all now well equipped with the tools and techniques to adapt, meaning that your audience will have an openness and ability to co-operate that may not have been likely pre ‘lockdown’.

On a different note, it is also important to remember technology doesn’t always co-operate. What works for small group chats is not enough to deliver a large-scale virtual or hybrid event. Don’t take chances, we are here to offer help and advice to make sure your events have the right equipment and production infrastructure to go without a glitch.

Content

Even more essential at a hybrid event than any other is ensuring the content captivates not only the on-site attendees but those virtually accessing too.

You need to make sure everyone is involved – think about if you are doing a Q&A how do you make it fair and interactive for all? Do you need handsets for those in the room and an online forum for offsite participants?

Whether content is shared live or made accessible for those off-site to download independently (so they can catch up later) is an important decision. You have the chance with hybrid events to make sure that the content and event is kept in people’s minds long after the final chairs have been packed away.

Collaboration

Hybrid events can offer more collaboration than ever before, with online polls and onsite Q&A’s you can get everyone involved.

Don’t forget that speakers need to be prepared to be able to deliver to both audiences and you need to structure sessions so that you can get people working across both attendance methods.

There is a lot to think about, but when it is done right the results can be exceptional.

Customisation

You will need to look at your event to establish which elements will translate well for people in the room and in their living rooms. This is where you will need to give the option for people to customise their experiences.

Even from the start of the registration process, it is essential that you are clear that you have two audiences and two types of people that you need to cater for. You can create customised registration paths for your in-person attendees versus your virtual attendees so they can sign up for appropriate sessions.

(Low) Carbon

Making what was a live event a hybrid event means you can keep the environmental impact low. Fewer flights, fewer tanks of petrol and fewer materials, equals less waste. Plus, at Neutrino we use local crews and kits wherever possible so when we work together it just adds to that eco glow you can wear knowing you have made a difference.

To create a successful hybrid event you will be swapping onsite crew for virtual assistant support and switching hotel rooms for virtual hosting equipment. That is where we come in, to provide the knowledge and know-how to help you make the shift in delivery to a hybrid event. We will come up with a plan that will work for you and your audience. We can be flexible for you, your event and your attendees.

If you would like to find out more about hybrid events or have a chat to see how they fit into your plans, then we would love to hear from you.