Jo-Ann McArthur, one of the fisheye founding partners, was responsible for the event planning of SarsStock, the biggest party ever held in Canada.
We love planning and running events, from trade shows to company parties. It’s an important part of our business and it’s something we’re really good at.
An incredibly important part of a successfully run event is being authentic, being real. And authenticity is often found in the details. The stuff that starts out looking small, but ends up making all the difference.
Here’s an example.
Giffin Koerth are North America’s leading company of forensic engineers. Think CSI in the real world and you’re not far off.
Every year Giffin Koerth host a party for Canada’s insurance and legal community. This year’s theme was 1920′s prohibition. We had costumes, fedoras, feather boas, tommy guns. Obviously, we needed a photographer to capture all this goodness.
We could have gone the obvious route and hired a guy with a digital camera, put him in a suit (or dress, we don’t judge) and just printed out the resulting photographs. You know, the way most any other event planning agency would have done.
Instead, we went the extra mile and used an original Polaroid Land Camera. It looks like an ancient press camera, and most importantly, the prints it produces are an authentic match for the photography of the period. Real photographs, not something spat out of a printer.
Next thing we did, we called our friends over at The Impossible Project and enquired if they had 500 sheets of sepia Polaroid 100 film left. They had, we paid for it and two days later a large box of film arrived at fisheye HQ.
At the event, we set up in front of a backdrop created from a shot taken from the Library of Congress. We had props, we had a real wine barrel we borrowed from a wine barrel store (Toronto has everything, even wine barrel stores) and we had a line-up.
People loved the event pictures they went home with, and more than that, the set-up itself generated a ton of buzz. Where did we get the cameras from? Who makes the film? We had more people interested in how it was done than were lining up for portraits.
Here are some sample pictures – taken in 2012, not 1926. We promise.
Of course, we also had videographers and digital photographers roaming the audience. Here are some reactions.