Category Archives: Political Events

Event AV: Who should I hire?

Things to know before hiring event AV

If you’re interested in working with an AV company for your event, there are a couple things you should know before you start the hiring process.

What is the goal of your event?
- Before you contact your the company you want to do your event AV, make sure you know what you want your event to be. Will it be a educational presentation? Will it be an engaging activity? Different equipment can drastically change how the event feels.
What are your needs vs. wants for the event?
- Your basic needs may be a screen, projector, a few speakers, and a microphone, but adding small details will go a long way to help your audience stay engaged. Lighting, drape, projection mapping, and much more can all help make your event unique and fun. It’s up to you to decide how important everything on your list is, especially when budget is on the line.
How big is your event?
- The size of the venue and the amount of people in the room can call for a wide range of equipment needed for the event. The dimensions of the room and the head-count should be enough for a technician to know what is required.

The Elby's at Main Street Station in Richmond, VA

2 screens, face-light, and a PA flying from truss at Main St. Station in Richmond, VA

Choosing an Event AV company

After you know your plan, the next step is to choose an event AV company. The most important job of an audio visual company is to provide solutions, not products. Instead of trying to sell you equipment, they should look at your goals and needs and provide the answers that will result in a successful event. Many companies will use the same equipment, so you should make your choice based on how knowledgeable they are and how their solution fits into your budget.

Event AV and lighting for a church event

Event AV can help to make your presentations unique, lighting backdrops are very versatile

The Lighting & Sound Company is a full event production company, not just an Event AV company. Maybe you need just a TV for a presentation, or maybe you need a full stage with a velour backdrop, projectors and screens, key lighting for a speaker, and a PA system. Allow us to make sure your event is perfect.

Main Street Station Event Lighting, AV

Main Street Station, Richmond, Virginia.

The Lighting & Sound Company can meet all of your Main Street Station Event Lighting and AV needs.

Originally opened more than a century ago in 1901, Main Street Station remains an iconic and historic landmark in Richmond. The train shed has recently been renovated, and is now one of Richmond’s largest and most popular event venues. Main Street Station is a fantastic venue for large corporate events and meetings. Our crew loves working in this beautiful space. MSS is located right down the street from our Richmond Office!

Richmond Magazine held the 2018 Elbys in the renovated train shed.

The new event space is pretty large, seating nearly 2,000. The old shed roof is easy to rig from, and most types of shows can fit between the glass-encased walls. Since it’s re-opening in 2017, the popular venue hosts political events, weddings, awards shows, charity auctions, corporate meetings & parties and more. Many annual and biannual events, such as the Richmond Wedding Expo, are moving from smaller venues to the new space.

The Lighting & Sound Co. provides production for the Richmond Weddings Fashion show and has since 2015.

Because of it’s convenient location down town, MSS is the perfect venue for corporate events. Main street station is walking distance from many hotels, restaurants, and bars. It’s also a train station, which originally worried us because of the noise. Thankfully, the trains aren’t loud enough to be distracting from any event we’d done so far. For a production company like us, ease of load in is very important. The train shed doesn’t have loading docks, but it does have multiple loading entrances that are easy to access, making it easy to load in alongside other vendors.

Rigging in Main Street Station is made easy by the multiple on-site lifts.

UNLV Presidential Debates TV Lighting Politics

The Third Presidential Debate

The final debate of the 2016 United States presidential election debates sent the team at The Lighting & Sound Co to Las Vegas, Nevada, to set up stage lighting for TV interviews. The final presidential debate took place at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s Thomas and Mack Center. This arena holds nearly 17,000 people, and we saw close to that many lighting technicians, stagehands, and riggers working on setup for the debate in the days beforehand.

Sunrise from ~30,000 feet

Lighting the interview stage went very similar to the TV stage lighting we did for the Vice Presidential Debates in Farmville, VA. However, we needed to source as much of the equipment as possible locally in Las Vegas rather than shipping it from our home base in Richmond, VA. Our friends at 4Wall Entertainment Lighting were great at helping us with this. Still, the Kino Flo Celeb TV stage lights required were unavailable in Las Vegas, so some came from 4Wall’s Los Angeles office, where they have plenty of film lighting gear, while we did send a pallet of equipment and stage lighting from Richmond VA as well.

Again we used Kino Flo Celeb 400Q film lighting fixtures for key lighting, with ETC Source Four Lekos as fill lighting. Control was the Martin Professional Maxxyz software running on M-PC with M-Touch for physical control

The Vice Presidential Debates

We joined the political madness for a week as we prepared to do some television lighting for a TV stage at the Vice Presidential debates in Farmville on Tuesday. We set up in Longwood University’s Health and Fitness Center, which is rated as one of the top 20 recreational centers at small colleges; at 74,683 gross square feet, it’s a pretty impressive space, topped off by a large rock climbing wall and LEED Gold certification. Longwood’s gym boasts of over 60 pieces of weight training and cardio equipment, but none of them were anywhere to be seen when we arrived. Instead, they had been replaced with a full media cafe, red carpets throughout, press boxes, stages, temporary power, communication rooms and Secret Service agents.

We headed out to Farmville, Virginia on Sunday to set up: Our TV stage was built on a 16′ x 16′ riser, and was an interview spot for before and after the debate. For events like these, every person on the crew needs to have Secret Service clearance, and has to have a number of credentials on them at all times.

We used Kino Flo Celeb 400s for front light, with Source Four Lekos as fill, and Celeb 400Qs as back light.