Category: Uncategorized

It s our Corona-versary. Yay.

COMPANY NEWS, EVENT INDUSTRY, LIVE EVENTS, NEWS, VIRTUAL EVENTS

It s been exactly one year since the pandemic shut us down. One whole fucking year.

We aren t speaking figuratively. It s been exactly one year since we literally had to turn the truck around. It was the event management equivalent of this:

but without Padma Lakshmi. Not a great day. 

Here s how it went down:

The long version: 

We had a big 2020 planned. Elaborate activations, experiential events, so many creative concepts coming to life it was going to be our best year yet. 

We had just wrapped an international broadcast event created for a client to announce a billion-dollar merger. We hosted the event in five locations: three in the states, one in Bangalore, India, and one in Brussels, Belgium. The Shanghai activation was cancelled at the last minute due to COVID closures, so the virus was top of mind for us, but not cause for concern outside of Asia. This was before masking was recommended by the CDC, and handwashing and protecting the elderly and immunocompromised was the primary concern. 

So we replaced shaking hands with fist bumps, stocked up on Lysol products, and powered on. (We even made a meme about it- check it out here).

March 11, 2020.  

The day of the shutdown was brutal. Decibel Events was finalizing a mobile marketing tour launch for a CPG client, for debut at the Boston St. Patty s Day Parade. We had spent months planning the tour, designing a badass mobile oatmeal bar for parade-goers, securing site and health permits, fabricating and wrapping the van, and training the team. 

We were ready to roll and super excited. 

Our driver was in the tour truck, heading to the event site, when we got the email: 

Turn the driver around. Everything is off.

So there it was. March 11, 2020 at 11:54am, and we were cancelled. 

That was the same day that the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a global pandemic. Soon thereafter, the NBA announced the cancellation of their season.

That was a turning point. If a billion-dollar machine couldn t make things safe for guests, no corporation wanted to put their attendees at risk. Within hours of the NBA s announcement, 100{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} of our live events were cancelled, and the reality of living through a global pandemic set in. 

The New Normal.

We re not the only company that experienced a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Across the board, the event industry was among the first hit, and the hardest. Our job as event planners, producers and organizers is to bring crowds together, and all of a sudden, crowds were the enemy.

So you give yourself a day, and then figure it out. Adapt or die.

Enter: Zoom calls. Masks. Hand sanitizer. The proper way to wash your hands (hello, thumbs). A new appreciation for toilet paper. And yes, a daytime Scotch (or two). Staying in became the new normal, and rapidly reshaping our business (while ignoring our abandoned, dust-accumulating luggage) became our only option. We leaned in.

We were fortunate to have some projects remain, from fabrication builds to new tech R&D, and are so grateful that new and existing clients trusted us to lend our virtual event experience to their digital activation.

March 11, 2021. 

It s been a year since our plans went up in smoke. We miss our old life. We miss our clients, our partners, and our vendors. We miss handshakes and hugs. 

We miss the thrill of turning a temporary space into an unforgettable experience. There just nothing like the rush of a crowd, the sound of applause, and the look on someone s face when they first see a badass experiential activation in person. Hell, we even miss tearing down those same activations, just a few days later.

Good Things to Come. 

We re starting to see the sun on the horizon, and it s s l o w l y thawing out the live event industry freeze. Vaccinations are rolling out at warp speed (thank you, science!), and we re elated to report that the outlook for mid-to-late 2021 for both hybrid and in-person events is optimistic, with high hopes for 2022. 

It s been a tough year. But we re here, we re open for business, and we re proud of what we have accomplished. 

And as soon as it s safe, we can t wait to see you in a crowded room.

dB Blog #319: Events to Check out This Quarter (Q1 2022)

Welcome to 2022. The year in which New York professor Ferdinand Shuller predicted, 100 years ago in 1922, that restaurants would offer self-serving tables with meals rising from kitchens one floor below. While that specific prediction has not panned out (at least as far as I know if I am in the wrong, and these self-serving, meal-rising kitchens do in fact exist, please let me know where), there are plenty of other cool reasons to celebrate the arrival of 2022. Like these nine events taking place in the coming few months (at the time of writing).

Sundance Film Festival (January 20 30)

Well, that ended quickly. From when we first drafted this article to today, another in-person/Hybrid event has gone back to 100{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} virtual. Thanks, Omicron, get bent. 

America s largest independent film festival has been bringing out upwards of 40,000+ attendees to Park City, Utah for the past forty years to celebrate and recognize independent filmmakers. Originally planned as a hybrid affair, it was just recently announced that the 2022 iteration will be fully online due to the Omicron variant. Historically, the Sundance Film Festival has been the premier venue for some super popular movies including The Blair Witch Project, Little Miss Sunshine, Get Out, and Napoleon Dynamite.

Fun fact: The Sundance Film Festival was founded by Robert Redford in 1981 in order to showcase American-made films and attract more filmmakers to Utah and was named after his Sundance Kid character from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Full details: https://www.sundance.org/blogs/countdown-to-the-2022-sundance-film-festival/

New York Fashion Week (February 10 14)

The biggest of the Big Four fashion shows (ahead of London, Milan, and Paris), New York Fashion Week typically attracts over 200,000 fashion-minded attendees to the city every year. The fashion extravaganza will unveil the 2022 designer fall and winter collections. This bi-annual event (with the second iteration scheduled for September 2022) takes place at various venues all across Manhattan and New York.  

Fun fact: Designers will pay in-demand celebrities as much as $100,000 for sitting front row at their fashion shows during New York Fashion Week (ya, we re looking at you Rhianna and Beyonce).

Full details: https://fashionweekonline.com/

Super Bowl 56 (February 13)

While the NFL s biggest event of the year is currently scheduled to take place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, it is possible that the game may be moved to a new location depending on what indoor event restrictions are implemented in the coming weeks. While bookies are currently placing the Green Bay Packers, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the top three, it is still uncertain as to which teams will be duking it out on February 13th.  One thing that is certain, however, is that this year s half-time show line-up is a damn fine one, including Eminem, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Doog, and Kendrick Lamar.

Fun fact: Each team competing in the Super Bowl gets 108 footballs. 54 are used for practice, and 54 are used for the game itself.

Full details: https://www.nfl.com/super-bowl/

Magic Las Vegas (February 13 16)

The first of the three fashion industry events (with subsequent conferences in New York and Nashville), Magic Las Vegas boasts a global audience of retail buyers, influencers, media, and industry stakeholders representing 860 brands coming together to learn, network, and spend, spend, spend. Fabulously.

Fun fact: 60+ countries and all 50 states were represented at the last Magic Las Vegas and Magic New York.

Full details: https://www.magicfashionevents.com/en/home.html

Screen Actors Guild Awards (February 27)

While the Golden Globes, currently experiencing a Hollywood boycott of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, were a significantly scaled down private affair on January 9th, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards are powering ahead (as of time of writing). This year s soiree will be co-hosted by Vanessa Hudgens and Rosario Dawson, Helen Mirren will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year s ceremony, and the celebrity fashion choices are sure to not disappoint.

Fun fact: The Screen Actors Guild award itself, referred to as The Actor , is a 16 inch tall statuette of a male figure holding a mask of comedy in one hand and a mask of tragedy in the other. The Actor is cast in solid bronze and weighs a hefty 12 pounds.

Full details: https://www.sagawards.org/

Rio Carnival (February 25 March 5)

Rio Carnival celebrates 300 years next year with the first one having taken place in Rio de Janeiro in 1723, to mark the start of Lent, which is a 40-day period that Catholics participate in that includes fasting and abstinence. So, they get it out of their systems while they can with this two-week celebration of food, alcohol, and fun. Recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest festival in the world, this year s version will be scaled down for pandemic-related reasons, but some of the major events are still expected to proceed at this time.

Fun fact: There are some mighty big numbers associated with Rio Carnival 2 million attendees each day, half a million foreigners travel in each year for the events, and 10 million liters of beer are consumed annually at Rio Carnival.

Full details: https://www.riocarnaval.org/

Mardi Gras (March 1)

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is determined that Mardi Gras 2022 will be a go this year, recently stating, without a doubt we will have Mardi Gras 2022, we will!

And what can partiers expect at this year s Mardi Gras? The festivities officially kicked off in the French Quarter on January 6, and are currently expected to go strong through March with krewes galore scheduled (which are the New Orleans clubs responsible for various parades throughout the nearly two-month-long celebration).

Fun fact: Everyone riding on a Mardi Gras float must be wearing a mask. This has nothing to do with COVID and is actually required by law. This mask-wearing tradition dates back generations and was instituted in order to remove the class constraints barriers that exist in society. As the official Mardi Gras website describes, when wearing a mask, carnival-goers were free to be whomever they wanted to be and mingle with whatever class they desired to mingle with. Cool beans.

Full details: https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/

South by Southwest (March 11 20)

South by Southwest (SXSW) is described as an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, music festivals, and conferences. This ten-day event has been held in Austin since 1987 and has grown exponentially during that time, welcoming over 417,000 attendees in 2019, before moving to online events for 2020 and 2021. SXSW 2022 includes a film festival, exhibitions, a comedy festival, conference sessions, a music festival, and more.

Fun fact: The original festival email address was 72662.465@compuserve.com and at one point they ran a panel titled So You Want to Make a CD-Rom? . And that is what they call old school .

Full details: https://www.sxsw.com/

Ultra Music Festival (March 25 27)

This Miami-based outdoor electronic music festival has been running annually since 1999. Headliners for this year s festival include David Guetta, Kygo, Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, Illenium, and so many more.

Fun fact: The Ultra Music Festival was named after the 1997 Depeche Mode album titled Ultra.

Full details: https://ultramusicfestival.com/ 

And the ones that didn t make it

These events, originally scheduled for Q1 2022, have been postponed or outright canceled:

• The 2022 Palm Springs International Film Festival slated for January 7 17 has been canceled;
• The Critics Choice Awards that were originally scheduled for January 9th will be postponed;
• The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for January 31st, will be rescheduled to a later date this year; and
• Giorgio Armani has canceled his fashion shows for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully you get the opportunity to take in one of these, or any other, large-scale event this quarter. If you do, and you get inspiration for a corporate event of your own, Decibel Events is the event production team to make your inspiration a reality.

Crowd Dynamics: How to Prevent Crowd Crush Through Proper Planning

Backstage, event design, event industry, event production inspiration, event production technology, everything else, live events, news, tips & tricks

Typically when you notice an old blog post of yours trending, it s a good thing. In this particular case it s actually just devastating. Back in 2015, our team at Decibel posted a blog titled Crowd Dynamics: How to Prevent (and Survive) a Human Stampede or Crowd Crush. At the time, we were reviewing the New Year s Eve stampede in Shanghai, and the Germany Love Parade disaster of 2010 to learn how best to plan for and avoid these types of tragedies at events. With the recent event disaster at Travis Scott s Astroworld concert, this post gained more traction as people searched to find out how something like this could happen. While the documentary and information on this post is still relevant, we thought it important to revise with current information, regulations and best practices.

As many of you know, Houston is my second home. While Decibel did not have a role in the planning or production of Astroworld, we do want to take the opportunity to present key learnings and provide best practices for our clients as they plan their events. What we will not do here is place blame, accusations, or conclusions for this particular event. There will be a time and place for that, but it is too early in the process to have any comment on this particular event before the investigations are complete. However, we firmly believe that no event should lead to an avoidable death or injury if it is planned correctly. So there will be many lessons learned here, and I am sure there were mis-steps along the way that could have telegraphed this in advance. This is avoidable, full stop.

Safety First Mindset

I will start by stating that at any large scale event, there needs to be a safety-first mindset. At Decibel, we are members of the Event Safety Alliance, and we recommend looking into the safety mindset and track record of all vendors and promoters. For crowd management, there is a industry standard protocol for the planning of large scale events. This is covered in the American National Standards Institute document ANSI ES1.9-2020. You can download a sample here, and the entire document will run $40 from ANSI. We HIGHLY recommend reading and following this protocol on your events.

Plan

When producing large scale events, the plan is key. These scenarios must be anticipated, and a plan of action must be in place, in writing. This needs to be agreed by all principal teams onsite as to when this will be executed. In this scenario, the plan causes the action when certain criteria are met, and the human element is minimized in the heat of the moment.

One great example of this is our High Wind Action Plan that we at Decibel have in place for outdoor events. As the wind increases and hits certain speeds, there is a written plan as to what action is automatically triggered. Once we hit the max speed, a full evacuation is in place. There is no real-time conversation or discussion needed. It is pre-determined based on safety and stage tolerances and is set to execute. This saves time, limits discussions, and ultimately leads to lives saved. This scenario can also be in place for crowds as they get energetic, as crowd crushes begin and as the situation reached a danger level.

For crowd specific planning, this document focuses on the DIME-ICE matrix for analyzing risks and managing crowds. This stands for Design, Information, Management, Expectations, Ingress, Circulation, Egress. This is a great explanation of how to asses and plan for crowds. We highly recommend reading and following this matrix as you plan your events.

Sample DIME-ICE matrix during Normal conditions. For illustration purposes only. Your matrix must be based on the circumstances of your event.

Venue Design

Safe venue design is paramount when developing your layout. Through this safety-first mindset, you can do your best to mitigate crowd crush and provide egress for participants. This is as important for outdoor events as it is for indoor events.

This is certainly one of the elements that will be reviewed in the Astroworld venue layout. One way of separating the crowd is through the configuration or design of a T-shape dividing the crowd to stage left and stage right sections. A few other aspects to consider. It is important to avoid 90 degree interior angles, as turns should be rounded- this avoids compressive corners. Also, the more separate corrals or split viewing areas with ingress and egress will help divide the crowd, as well as allow medical and staff to arrive at emergencies as needed. I am sure CADS and layouts will be released in the investigation and I am curious as to how this was initially set up.

Image of Stage Barrier T Shape Design

Communications

Aside from pre-planing and venue design, I really feel that communications are paramount when it comes to safety. At large scale events, cellular coverage can never be relied upon for any emergency. At Decibel, we bring in large amounts of radios for our events, and add repeaters as necessary.

Radios for Communication on Large Scale Event

Teamwork:

Finally, teamwork is important. You can plan, design and communicate to your hearts content, but if all of the teams are not working the same plan, are not working together, all the rest can fall apart. This is one of our strongest attributes at Decibel- we put team above all else and it shows in our productions.

Other Considerations:

Covid and general attitudes are something we are really keeping our eye on as we emerge from this pandemic. After being in lockdown and distanced for two years, the energy of the crowd needs to be taken into account. This will be something to continue to reassess and review as we receive more data. But in addition to the interest of getting back in person, the energy of being around and excited, there is also a wave of aggressive behavior across the board. We are seeing this in the air and at restaurants, at businesses and at town hall and PTA meetings. Decorum has really taken a back seat with some individuals. I do not have a solution here, but it is important to keep an eye on in the coming months as we get back to events.