The room is built by mid afternoon. Screens on, sound system rung out, lectern lit, tables dressed. Then the show starts and the evening comes apart in the second half, because nobody agreed what happens in the few seconds between the host reading a name and the winner reaching the microphone. Awards ceremony AV hire, meaning the audio visual (AV) equipment and the crew who run it, is judged in those few seconds rather than in the kit list.
Awards ceremony AV hire is a timing problem before it is a kit problem
A conference runs in sessions. A gala dinner runs in courses. An awards ceremony runs as a list, and it moves quickly: an announcement, a category graphic, a pre-recorded video, a music sting, a lighting state, a walk to the stage, a photograph, a speech of unknown length, then the same again for the next category.
Twenty categories is not twenty items. It is several hundred separate actions, most landing within a second or two of each other, and that is the real measure of how complex your night is. We would rather see a draft running order than a floor plan. The floor plan tells us where to put a screen. The running order tells us how hard it has to work.
The running order is a technical document
Most running orders arrive as a timing sheet written for the host and the venue: what happens, and roughly when. That version cannot be operated. The version a crew can run has a line for every cue, in order, with the department that owns it named against each one. Sound takes the sting and the microphone. Video takes the category graphic and the pre-recorded insert, still called a VT after the video tape it once played from. Lighting takes the state and the follow spot.
The cues are built into a stack before the doors open. At the UK Customer Experience Awards at Wembley we ran the video and audio content on QLab, software that designs and plays back sound, video, light and show control cues, because the evening mixed pre-recorded and live content throughout. Building a stack like that takes hours. Rebuilding it because the running order changed at six o’clock takes hours you have already spent.
Award graphics need a deadline and a route for changes
Names, category titles, sponsor credits, shortlist boards and winner videos are content, and content is always late for reasons nobody controls. Shortlists move, sponsors sign late, a winner sends their video the day before. Plan for that rather than hoping around it.
Set a cut-off for the main content build, then agree a route for changes after it. One named person on your side who can approve a late change, and one place the files live, protect more of the evening than any equipment. Have every name checked by somebody who knows the people, because a misspelled name on a screen the size of a wall is the one mistake nobody in the room forgets. Check the shape of the picture area too, because a modular LED (light emitting diode) wall is whatever shape the panels make, as our guide to LED screen hire for conferences explains.
Radio microphones are a licensed resource, not an endless one
An awards night is unusually hungry for microphones. A host, a lectern, a roving microphone for winners who accept from the floor, a band later on, and talkback for the crew all live in the same radio spectrum, and that spectrum is regulated. Ofcom’s guidance on programme making and special events sets out that a standard licence is used for equipment such as radio microphones, in ear monitors or wireless cameras, alongside a licence exempt band in Channel 70 and a shared UK licence covering Channel 38. Ofcom notes that users can typically achieve around ten radio microphones in that shared range, in the same place at the same time.
That is a genuine ceiling, and in a hotel with another event next door it can be lower. If your night needs more open microphones than the spectrum will carry, somebody has to plan where microphones are shared and handed back between categories, and that belongs in the running order, not in a technician’s head. Our audio team settles it at the specification stage, because finding it on the day leaves nowhere to go.
Comms is the thing actually holding the show together
The one system a crew would take into an awards night above all else is comms: the closed headset loop linking the stage manager to sound, video, lighting and the follow spot. The audience never sees it and it rarely appears on a supplier’s web page. It is what makes one cue land at the same instant for four people who cannot see each other.
One voice calls the show, usually a stage manager working from the running order where they can see both the stage and the host. If you ask a supplier who calls your show and the answer is vague, press on it, as with the other questions to ask an AV supplier before you book.
Lighting stings, strobes and the part of the room you cannot see
Awards lighting works in bursts. A warm state for dinner, a sting on the announcement, a bigger state for the walk-on, then down for the speech. That is the pattern our lighting designer built at Wembley, washing the room in colour through dinner and cutting stings for the awards and the entertainment after them.
Fast flashing effects need deciding in advance rather than on the night. The Epilepsy Society sets out that around 3% of people with epilepsy have photosensitive epilepsy, and that lights flashing between 16 and 25 times a second are the most likely to trigger a seizure, inside a wider band of roughly 3 to 30 flashes per second. In a room of several hundred guests that is not hypothetical. Decide whether strobing is used at all, tell the lighting designer where the line sits, and warn people on the way in if it is.
When the running order slips, and the rehearsal that catches it
It always slips. A winner is at the bar, a speech runs long, a sponsor needs their moment moved. The question is not whether the evening drifts but who decides what happens next, and that person is named before the doors open or not at all.
Give them a short list of things that can be shortened or dropped without breaking anything, agreed in the production meeting while it is still a calm conversation rather than a whispered one behind a curtain. Venues make this tighter than people expect. At Wembley we rigged inside the access window we were given, because the hall was booked before and after the show, leaving no slack at either end.
A rehearsal is where all of this gets tested, and it is not the host practising. It is the first and usually only time the cue stack, comms, microphones and running order run together in the real room. A quick pass through the top of the show and a couple of award sequences finds the problems that would otherwise find you at nine o’clock with the room watching.
One duty sits behind all of it. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is clear that an organiser carries prime responsibility for the health and safety of workers, the audience and contractors, and that a contractor should show evidence of a trained workforce and the competence of key staff. Asking for it is part of your job, not an awkward favour.
Talk to us about your awards night
We deliver awards ceremonies and gala dinners with audio, video, lighting, rigging and staging from one place, so one team holds the whole running order instead of four suppliers each holding a quarter of it. Monique Iball, writing about an annual conference and awards ceremony we delivered, described a fast and efficient setup and a polite crew on site.
If you have an awards night in the diary, send us the draft running order. Even a rough one tells us more than an equipment list. Reach us through our contact page or at hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk, and we will tell you straight what the evening needs and where the pressure points sit.
