Latin America. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected hundreds of business sectors, thousands of businesses and millions of people, but perhaps no industry has been hit as hard as Live Events. Corporate presentations, concert tours, sporting events, plays, theme parks, all of that, and virtually everything else, has been completely shut down for the foreseeable future, leaving event producers, audiovisual integration and equipment rental companies, manufacturers, distributors, and technical, production and design personnel underutilized and out of work.
But as necessity is the mother of invention, several live event companies are reviewing their resources and capabilities to create innovative solutions and proposals to combat the pandemic and help their community, while keeping their businesses and their employees' valuable jobs afloat. Among the first to make this leap are PRG, Upstaging, Tait, Mountain Productions and All Access Staging, to name a few.
Equipment rental companies for the production of events and shows, especially those with an extensive inventory of equipment, seem to be ideal for offering many service options for emergency work; think 3-way radios, microphones, speakers and headphones, mobile power generation and distribution plants, indoor, outdoor lighting, and battery-powered lighting, among others. Most also have cargo trucks and capacity to build temporary structures. And while there is a small sector of companies specializing in emergency services, and they are probably the first on the list to receive the call from authorities at the municipal, state and federal levels, local government institutions could choose to look for nearby suppliers, which is an opportunity for Live Events companies to participate in initiatives to fight COVID-19.
"Our goal has been to shift the focus from being dedicated to the live events market to temporarily transform ourselves into a support for emergency services, health departments, among others," explains Alexander Donnelly, PRG's vice president of Corporate Development. The company has made much of its inventory available to local entities in its 31 warehouses around the world. "If there is a small city, with a team of just three people in charge of health services, they may not have access to companies specializing in emergencies," he explains. "Or they may have access, but then we may be their second choice."
Donnelly admits that their inventory is such that they would have to be creative in some situations. "We don't have tons of continuous light lamps, for example, but we can change the settings of our LED lights for similar functions," he says. "Or the equipment we use to suspend vehicles during auto shows could be used to hold generators."
Production companies with scenic material manufacturing capabilities have gone a step further, taking a turn to produce vital personal protective equipment, such as protective masks. PRG recently responded to the call of New York State authorities for this critical piece of protective equipment; the state forecasts it will need 5 million protective masks, and Donnelly claims to have the capacity to produce 15,000 units per week. "If you have a working workshop with basic capabilities, you should be able to do this," Donnelly says. "It would only take a few days to set it up."
That's exactly what Upstaging, an event producer specializing in concert tours, has been doing at its Sycamore, Illinois, facility. According to general manager John Huddleston, the company began discussing what could be done at a basic level, with the initial focus on manufacturing fabric mouth coverings (they feature a sewing department), before realizing that they didn't really provide all the necessary protection.
"We realized that protective masks are a really imperative thing," he explains, "so we made a prototype, worked all weekend and sent information and samples to the people who could use them: fire stations, police departments and emergency services, as well as the authorities of the State of Illinois." The interest of the community quickly generated and they began to receive orders, a few days after they generated the initiative.
"We have the ability to respond to our rock customers who call with crazy ideas, and we always have to move fast," he explains. "No one in the live events sector can wait for long, so we quickly started making progress on this."
Huddleston notes that companies like his also have the ability to provide additional resources should the need arise, such as tents and portable panels to create rooms with divisions for use in temporary shelters. Although, of course, the hope is that such an eventuality will not happen. For him, the important thing is that Upstaging is helping both the community and his team.
"We don't see this as a profit center; this is a survival center," Huddleston says. "We're doing everything we can to keep our staff employed and on our payroll, rather than the government payroll."
Text written by David Johnson, consultant for AVIXA and a veteran of the live events industry, and serves as Manager of Live Experience Group.
