The Science of the Show Part 3
by Jim Fuller
Published in Midwest Meetings Magazine
Meeting rooms are often selected one to two years in advance of meeting dates. Sometimes the room is selected because it's free with the hotel booking. Sometimes the proximity to the golf course or ocean where free time activities will take place is a factor. If the main objective of your meeting is to entertain or reward your top dealers, customers, salespeople, or executives, these are valid selection criteria. But if your main objective is to convey information the selection of the room should be given careful consideration.
A beautifully designed meeting room doesn't always provide for beautiful sound reinforcement or projection. Architectural elements such as mirrors, hanging chandeliers, and pillars interfere with visual projection and sight lines. Hard surfaces such as marble and glass play havoc with audio as sound bounces off of them and around the room. Also, that room with floor-to-ceiling windows and an oceanfront view may look spectacular, but it is impractical for a show featuring video projection.
When clients hire us to stage a meeting, the first question I ask is, "How high is the ceiling?" When it comes to ceilings, the higher the better. Ceiling height influences screen size, sound reinforcement, and the technical design of your production. Higher ceilings increase your options in all of these areas.
Screen sizes for meetings range from 6' x 8' to 18' x 24' and larger. To be completely visible, screens must be four to six feet off the floor. So the equation for determining the maximum screen size possible in a room is ceiling height minus four feet.
In a room with a ten-foot ceiling, your maximum screen size is only 6' high x 8' wide. If the room is long and narrow, the images projected at that size would be too small to effectively convey information to people sitting in the back of the room. And it is not advisable to go to maximum screen size anyway. If you do, there will be nothing above the screen - no trussing, no lighting, and no draping, just ceiling.
When you have a large audience and need a large screen or screens, you have to book a room that will accommodate. Rooms with low ceilings not only limit screen size but make sound reinforcement more difficult because it is hard to distance the speakers evenly from the entire audience. With speakers on the floor at the front of a long narrow room, people in the front rows can be blasted out of their seats while people in the back strain to hear. To equalize the sound, you can place another set of speakers mid-way back in the room on the floor, but the people seated near them will suffer too.
We prefer rooms that have higher ceilings with rigging points from which speakers, trusses, lighting, and projection can be hung. By flying speakers from rigging, we can aim the sound down at the audience rather than in their faces and create equal sound level and quality throughout the room.
Another important advantage of rigging is that it allows a cleaner, less obtrusive set-up. To support screens and speakers from the floor all the way to proper working height requires long unstable screen legs or massive scaffolding. Both take up floor space and even when black, are clearly visible. Equipment rigged from ceilings takes up no floor space, and audiences barely notice it.
When selecting a venue, it's also important to make sure there is enough space. The stage, AV equipment, and technicians will often occupy one quarter to one third of the room. If the room is barely large enough to accommodate your audience, it may not be large enough to accommodate your AV set-up.
We like to design the equipment layout and the audiovisual content for the specific room in which the meeting will take place. That way, the show and content are designed with the room in mind.