Against a backdrop of sunset pinks, yellows, reds, and oranges, a disco ball spins above a kaleidoscope of coloured lights, haze, and a dance floor. The party offers space for everyone, with relaxed areas, soft lighting, and acoustic music alongside a bar and house party beats featuring celebrity DJ Gok Wan on the decks.
The scene unfolds across three large dome marquees erected over three days in the grounds of a country estate. Speeches, food, drinks, and dancing follow as the party gets into full swing.
This celebration is attended by 300 guests who have been vital in raising millions of pounds for medical equipment and world-class care for Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity. With a brief to produce something outstanding and original, the production sets a high bar to reflect the incredible work of the people attending.
The experience is orchestrated by AV specialists Berry Productions, who use creativity and technology to create standout experiences. From initial visuals, themes, and dreams, they take on the build of staging, architectural lighting, PA, custom branded projections, a grand entrance, and not forgetting, a one-metre mirror ball.
Lights: ChamSys, CHAUVET and ADJ
The MagicQ MQ50 is used to operate the lighting – ChamSys is Berry Productions’ preferred lighting control brand because of its user friendliness and capabilities. An array of lighting fixtures fill the disco dome, as well as a haze machine from CHAUVET complemented by ADJ’s Vizi Beam RXONE moving head beams. CHAUVET Spots are also used for custom-branded gobo projections of the Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity logos in the party’s chill-out spaces.
Sound: Allen & Heath, RCF, Crown and Martin Audio
For the DJ stage, the mix includes a couple of Allen & Heath’s SQ-5 48-channel digital mixers to control the live sound, together with RCF stage monitors and RCF HDL6-A and HDL26-A line array working with eight subwoofers, including RCF’s SUB 8004-AS and SUB 9019-AS. In the outdoor garden space, Martin Audio X10 BlacklineX 10" and X8 BlacklineX 8" passive speakers work off Crown’s XLS 2002 DriveCore 2 power amp.
Berry Productions have rarely used Martin Audio and RCF kit together but find that the two brands work well in unison. The SQ-5 is one of their core classics and a mixer they turn to year after year, always discovering new things they can do with it.
And Action
With the core lighting and audio kit in place, the party has its foundations on which to build the creative stuff – the dressing, the branding and floral backdrops – to produce a very special event. The garden area is equipped with a lit-up section for photos and welcome canapés while the Martin Audio speakers relay the speeches, using Sennheiser microphones, and the vocals of acoustic performers. The party marquee finds Gok Wan on three Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000s and a DJM-A9 club mixer – his set is all about filling the dance floor long into the night.
All in all, it’s an incredible evening to celebrate and appreciate the people who are doing amazing things to make such a difference to sick children. The pictures say it all…
Berry Productions Founder and Director of Events Katie Haddock on the benefits of working with Leisuretec:
‘We find Leisuretec to be a very price-competitive distributor, with many of our favourite brands in stock. We work across numerous event sectors, including more bespoke events we manage, so our equipment must be high-quality and versatile. There’s a wide variety available at Leisuretec.
It’s also convenient to place a large order for lighting and audio – the ability to get everything in one place is beneficial. The kit is always at the door when it should be. We have consistently experienced excellent service. We’ve become familiar with the brands. For example, we first purchased RCF speakers from you, and since then RCF have invited us to events and provided fantastic training days, strengthening our relationship with the manufacturers.
About Berry Productions
Berry Productions is a production house that combines bundles of imagination with technical expertise. They specialise in staging and AV, event management, and immersive experiences.
About Leisuretec
Established in 1990, we are Trade Distributors of Professional and Commercial Audio, Lighting, Video, Special Effects and Ancillary. Through our AV Hire Production, AV Installation and Re-seller customers we address the live entertainment, leisure, commercial, residential and retail markets throughout the UK.
We support our trade customers with immense stock holding across a vast choice of products, knowledgeable technical support, competitive trade pricing, speedy delivery and attentive after-sales support.
