As head of Bravo Productions, a Long Beach, Calif.-based special events planning firm, Greg Jenkins has to sell the city of Long Beach to any and all comers.
“To be honest, Long Beach isn’t that hard a sell,” Jenkins says. “The city has a lot of the advantages of Los Angles without the disadvantages. The Long Beach Airport is a lot easier to negotiate than LAX, and downtown Long Beach is very clean and convenient—you can walk to practically everything.”
Jenkins’ talents were put to the test for a corporate event his company recently managed at the Long Beach Convention Center. Sunrider International, an herbal supply company, wanted to do something different and ambitious for its national gathering of 800 employees. Bravo Productions came up with a themed event called Myths, Legends & Fairytales. Drawing on classic fairytales such as Alice In Wonderland, Beauty & the Beast and Cinderella, Bravo designed elaborate fairytale settings in which each storybook heroine moved down a road of adventure. (Heroines were chosen rather than heroes because 90 percent of the attendees were female.)
Bright fantasy colors—hot pink and lavender, lime green, yellow, and deep red—helped set the tone. Ten-foot-tall castle facades rendered in purple tones provided an eerie storybook feel. Oversized flowers, butterflies and mushrooms loomed overhead.
Most of the props were custom-built for the event; some were welded into shape out of pencil steel to create the form and then covered with window screen. Many of the props were decorated in all-natural vegetation, including bark, onion seed, strawflower, and peanut shells—a way of connecting the props to the herbal supply company throwing the bash.
Fresh roses, sunflowers, freesia, daffodils, and other assorted springtime floral were used throughout the hall, and were specifically chosen for their herbal medicinal value. Eight-foot-tall storybooks were constructed and oversized pop-up books of each story were built for buffet station decor.
Taking the original version of the fairytale and highlighting the female character, the pop-up books were sketched and rendered by Bravo’s art department to further bring the decor to life. Simple animation used windshield wiper blades, small motors and battery packs to make props move, creating a sense of motion to the fairytale environment. (The oversized butterfly wings moved up and down and oversized Card Soldier heads moved from side to side.)
“Everyone was struck by how unique the theme and the setting were,” Jenkins says. “For us, it was a chance to take an ordinary corporate meeting and create this entirely different world for them.”
Best of all, Jenkins observed, most of the attendees were able to walk to their hotel after the event—something that in, say, Los Angeles would have been indeed a fairytale.
