As top event professionals all know, creating a completely original design is never easy. What's even more challenging is coming up with a new concept for an annual event attended largely by the same people each year. Luckily for Hillary Harris, executive director of special events at Warner Bros. Studios, her client is as artistically inclined as she is. "We are able to brainstorm and bounce ideas off one another to consistently come up with fresh designs for this event," Harris said.
The event is L.A. Screenings, a weeklong, daytime event attended by more than 1,500 international media buyers, who use Brownstone Street, a popular backlot site for special events at Warner Bros., for breakfast and lunch meetings between screenings of new media in the studio's state-of-the-art Steven J. Ross Theater.
"This year, shape and color was our muse," Harris said. As was the work of Italian artist Piero Fornasetti, a pointillist working in mainly black and white dots with a burst of red. In the spirit of his work, the design was bold, capable of standing up to the weeklong time frame during the day, which inevitably came with a different set of rules.
"We began by rigging an all-white scrim over the entire street," Harris said. "Beneath this, we added five-, 10-, and 15-foot overlapping discs, which created an ever-changing canopy of shadow and light."
Below this, five lounge groupings were arranged down the street. Each one had some combination of red, black, or white furnishings, all from several different rental and prop companies. "The entire project actually utilized work from nine creative partners. This in and of itself created a dynamic design," she said.
Seating was an important element of the design as well, primarily because networking is one of the objectives of the week. To that end, Harris chose seating that not only was part of the design but also featured the branding of Warner Bros. and its various media properties. "Ghost chairs were grouped with white, orange, black, and red Pantone chairs, and others were embellished with vinyl clings ala Fornasetti's style," she said. "Those clings were either of the Warner Bros. logo or bearing the faces of some of the stars from the 2015 lineup of shows."
Harris also turned a shelving unit into a decor element by inserting images of more Warner Bros. talent in each circle. For the centerpieces, a mother-daughter team was given scripts from our hit television shows and fashioned them into paper flowers. Containers were branded with the titles of the shows. The creative recycling became quite the topic as guests slowly realized what these flowers really were. "As far as design goes," Harris continued, "a huge part of making something fresh is to look at something in a new way and reinvent its use."
This event demonstrates that daytime events can be just as magical as evening events through the use of bold shape and color, ingenuity, and reinventing ideas with a new purpose.
