UAlbany Foundation's Citizen Laureate Awards

The UAlbany Foundation came to us to produce their flagship event for the year, the Citizen Laureate Awards. It was the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic they were holding the even in person. Additionally, the venue they had used in years past was under construction. It fell to us to imagine a new, and better than ever production package to welcome everyone back. The new venue chosen was a large open lobby in a building on the SUNY Polytechnic campus. It came with a few challenges, first of which was the lack of rigging locations. We had to come up with options for supporting a large number of lighting fixtures (~60) while taking up as little floor space as possible. With some innovation we managed to blanket the room in light without eating up the valuable floor space needed for seating. We also wanted to highlight  with lighting the events theme, which was "Starry Night". Through a combinations of gobos, wash fixtures and lasers we created a whimsical night sky high above the heads of the guests. Another challenge the room presented was its very poor acoustics. The room features glass walls all around the perimeter, with granite floors and an inflated plastic roof, all of which make for a very challenging environment for speech intelligibility. To make these issues even worse, during the event there was a torrential downpour which resonated very loudly upon the plastic roof. Despite all of these issues, the sound system we deployed for the space performed flawlessly, with many guests actually commenting on how clear the sound was despite the roar of the rain pouring down on the building.