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Lighting Design and Technology for Special Events

Coffee station highlighted during an evening rooftop event

My name is Mike Mallinson, and I am a lighting designer. Depending on your background, you may have only heard that title associated with concerts or live theater; more likely, you have never heard it before. What exactly does a lighting designer do? And why would you want to hire one?

Lighting is essential for every event.  It provides the simple illumination that makes your event visible, and the highlights to pull your audience’s focus in the right direction.  Most importantly, though, it creates the mood for you and your guests, for business or pleasure. A simple dash of color can transform a space from mundane to dazzling. A pattern in the light can create a sense of mystery – as if there is more to the space than can be seen by the naked eye. Projection can take scattered beams of light and create concrete imagery and branding. Added together, these elements will make your event unforgettable.

At M Factor Lighting we do all of this and more. We can provide audio systems to support anything from background listening to DJ systems to a full stage band. We can provide staging, truss structures, fashion show sets, and even simultaneous interpretation for those events where the speaker and the audience may speak different languages. Boardroom audio-visual services? We’ve got you covered. We can provide full service technical production from the design concept to the nuts and bolts.

Please browse this site to find out more about us and what we can provide for your event.  If you’d like, I would be happy to meet with you and give you a personalized take on what M Factor Lighting can bring to the table for you.

I look forward to working with you!

 

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Turning Point Fundraiser

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Last weekend we had the opportunity to dress up a fundraiser event for the Turning Point School in Culver City, thanks to caterers and event planners Global Cuisine by Gary Arabia. The event was held at The Lot, the former Warner Hollywood Studios, on their new rooftop event space, 7 stories off the ground in the center of Hollywood. The view from the rooftop is spectacular, offering 360 degree panoramas of Los Angeles from the Hollywood hills to the harbor.

A high-elevation outdoor event space provides quite a number of challenges. The first is actually getting the equipment to the rooftop – in this case, since the space was at the top of a parking garage, there was vehicle access, but there is also a 7′ height restriction through the garage so it’s not accessible with a typical box truck. In this case, we used a utility trailer to ferry the gear up to the top of the garage.

The next major challenge is wind. Since we’re 7 stories off the ground, the wind can get extremely gusty. That’s a big enough challenge with 12′ lighting booms and carnival lighting strings, but it’s even scarier with a 10′ x 14′ projection screen! The solution is making sure you have plenty of counterweight to stabilize anything sticking up in the wind. For the screen, instead of using the usual leg kit that comes with it, we built an arch out of 12″ x 12″ lighting truss with 5′ extensions in front and back to brace it. We also piled an additional 500# of sandbags on the base to give it plenty of stability. Each lighting boom got an outrigger pipe sticking out in the opposite direction that the stringers were stretching, with 140# of weight on the outrigger to keep it from pulling itself over.

Despite all the technical challenges of mounting an event in a space like this, it really looked beautiful when it was done, and we did it without breaking the bank, which is important on a fundraiser. As much fun as celebrity events and backyard parties for the rich and famous are to do, it’s really nice to be involved in something as meaningful as this!