The show is the easy part

Clients rarely buy calm. They buy a concept, a structure, a set of deliverables. Calm is the thing they notice afterwards, usually by its absence.

What calm is made of

Redundancy, mostly. A second media server that never gets used. A spare fixture in the truck. A cue stack rehearsed enough times that the operator could run it with the monitor off. None of it appears in the photographs and all of it appears on the budget, which is why it is the first thing a cheaper quote removes.

For MG at Goodwood we ran 100 per cent uptime across every show day on an anamorphic install that had never been done at that scale at the festival. That number is the whole point. Nobody in the crowd knew there was a number.

Two examples of the plan changing

The Geneva Motor Show was once cancelled 24 hours before opening. The McLaren stand was built, the press were booked, the cars were on site. Within 48 hours the entire experience was reassembled at McLaren’s headquarters in Woking, press and product intact. That is not a recovery story, it is a rehearsal story. You can only move that fast if the thing was designed to come apart and the crew have worked together long enough to not need briefing.

At the Aston Martin V12 Ball we put 300 guests and a Michelin-starred dinner inside a working production line, with a four hour turnaround back to manufacturing. Independent power systems so factory operations were never at risk. Rigging designed around live machinery. The guests experienced an 80 metre walkway through the heart of the factory. The factory experienced a slightly unusual evening and a normal Monday.

The technology is working hardest at the moments when the audience is least aware of it.

What this means for a brief

If two quotes are meaningfully different in price, the gap is usually not creative. It is spares, crew numbers, rehearsal time and contingency. Those are the four things that decide whether the evening is calm, and they are the four things easiest to strip out of a proposal without the difference showing until the day.

It is worth asking any supplier, ours included, exactly what happens when the primary system fails. The answer tells you what you are buying.