When a company has literally millions of sales representatives, employees and customers around the world, it takes a spectacular event to engage them all. That’s the challenge faced by the team that creates the biennial NuSkin event, a conference and celebration for all of the people involved in this direct-to-consumer skin care and lifestyle products company.
Every two years, Executive Visions Inc. (EVI) produces a spectacular live experience in Salt Lake City, Utah. Michael Marto, CEO of Executive Visions and executive producer for the event, draws together a team of world class producers, designers, writers, directors and creative visionaries to execute a remarkable program flawlessly.
Thousands come from all over the globe to participate in the conference at the Vivint Energy Solutions Arena, but millions of others watch a livestream from their homes and offices — which means some may be watching in the middle of the night. What draws them is the stars NuSkin attracts to make the event meaningful, as well as the production values that energize their base, whether they are in the arena or watching in their offices and living rooms.
“This is a celebration of the NuSkin brand, their products, their marketing and their people,” said John Featherstone, partner and founder of Lightswitch, the company that provided the lighting and visual design for the conference’s opening and closing shows.
The multi-day event has three components, he said: education, celebration and entertainment. “For example, there was a master class on marketing your own creativity, with film director Ron Howard and composer Hans Zimmer. There’s the opening night concert with Gwen Stefani — because NuSkin is a company that empowers women in many cultures, in ways that a traditional workplace just doesn’t do.”
At the end of two days of leadership addresses and seminars about product science, marketing, brand and motivation, the closing performance featured Oscar, Grammy and Emmy-winning composer Hans Zimmer and a live performance of music from his films, including Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lion King and others.
The top-level entertainment serves a dual purpose, Featherstone said: “Not only to acknowledge and recognize all those who have come, but to make a statement about the brand NuSkin is and the excellence that is aligned with that brand.”
Featherstone and partner Jorge Ignacio “Iggy” Rosenberg served as co-designers for the lighting and entertainment aspects of the multimedia production. The 2019 conference was Lightswitch’s fifth time with the event, through their longtime relationship with Marto of EVI.
“What Michael and his team at EVI specialize in is these large scale bespoke events, with major name talent, put together in a format that literally can’t be seen anywhere else.” Featherstone said. “But Michael creates a seamless arc for the guest experience, making it feel like a cohesive whole, not just a business meeting with a concert stuck on the end. The audience was woven into an event that included award shows and celebrations and the reveal of the destination city for an incentive trip. We work with Michael on creating a visual tableau, a holistic shared vision — the ‘V’ part of EVI.”
They had one starting point: “Ignite,” the one-word theme for the event. The theme promised an action-packed conference, lending a sense of movement and excitement that allowed for just about any visual concept the team could dream up.
With three major performances — the opening Gwen Stefani show, the NuSkin business presentations and Hans Zimmer’s production — all happening in the same arena using the same lights and video equipment, the Lightswitch team had their hands full. Creating a light plot that would accommodate everyone’s expectations and produce three spectacular shows was “a heavy lift,” Featherstone noted. He and the event designers at EVI worked closely to determine the path forward, a concept that would maximize the effect of each performance and presentation in the arena space.
“The visual concept here is best defined by the words ‘in motion,’” said Featherstone. “We want to create an experience that’s different from your local arena and has a level of immersion that combines the visuals in a way that delivers a show right into the laps of the audience, whether they are in row A or Z.”
The Lightswitch designers also had to take into account how the visual effects would appear to the audience livestreaming the event. “There’s an audience in the room that is incredibly important, but there are also all those people watching on the livestream,” he said. “Then there’s social media — we had to make sure that this was not a blown-out blob of light on iPhones and cameras.”
Featherstone called this challenge “a study in balance and verification. We made sure that we shot test shots from the rehearsals with iPhones, so we knew what was going on. We worked with the video engineers as well. There’s a dialogue between the lighting people and the video people. There’s a bandwidth we’ve found — the eye, the broadcast camera lens and the iPhone camera lens all work well together. Even when it’s shot by a handheld iPhone and put on YouTube, it still looks good.” He added, “We lighting people create memories, but the video people create evidence.”
To produce the most exciting visual display for all audiences, Featherstone and Rosenberg designed yet another kind of performance: one high in the air. They used kinetic winches from Glow Motion Technologies to create a dimensional element at the eye level of the audience in the arena’s highest seats. Each winch controls a one-meter LED rod, created from a triangular array of LEDs that provide uniform vision and distribution throughout the arena. The technology allowed Lightswitch to create a show within a show, with skewers of light dancing in various patterns.
“This let us have the rig on the stage and all of the lighting, but also a kinetic element moving above the audience, one that the people in the upper levels of the arena were looking through,” Featherstone said. “It made them feel like more of a part of the show.”
Hundreds of moving lights helped complete the spectacle, provided by rental company Video West, Inc. in Phoenix, Arizona. Four circle trusses hung with Robe Robin Spiider luminaires delivered ultra-bright, well-defined light beams for geometric patterns and effects. Martin MAC Viper AirFX luminaires hung on trusses across the middle of the arena and in front of the performance area, commingling their hard-edged beams with the Spiiders for mid-air effects and doubling as wash lights that bathed the audience in color. For front and side light on the entertainers as well as additional movement, the Lightswitch designers filled six square trusses over the stage, three booms on either side of the stage and two additional trusses over the audience with Robe MegaPointe fixtures for their sharp parallel beams and their wash and shaping effects. MAC Viper Performance fixtures rounded out the selection of moving lights, adding rotating gobos to the mix, while Robe BMFL WashBeams produced the large beams, with shutters than allowed for angled positions when needed. Robe’s ColorStrobes positioned along the front-of-house trusses provided the ability to create strobe effects in white or colors.
The centerpiece of the show was the 100-by-48-foot (WxH) 4mm LED screen, which formed the upstage wall for the presentations and performances. “The wall was on an automated system that tracked upstage and downstage,” said Featherstone. “It would raise up, track downstage and lower back in again. It also worked as a traveling guillotine to hide the band gear.”
Two assistant lighting designers, two lighting programmers, a moving light technician, three disguise programmers, three master electricians with their two assistants and a winch programmer rounded out the Lightswitch senior team. Glow Motion also provided its own project director, Adam “Pockets” Roddick and project manager Kelsey Heisel to ensure the kinetic winches performed as expected.
Lightswitch’s Austin Shapley served as media designer for the video content, working with the distributors of movies Zimmer had scored. Shapley built a dynamic program of rapid-fire images and kaleidoscopic effects to accompany the composer’s lushly orchestrated live performance. In addition, the Lightswitch team worked closely with Very Good Studios, the creators of the videos for the educational portion of the conference, to be sure the entertainment systems were fully integrated with the corporate video presentations. Shapley used disguise media servers to drive the video content to the wall.
The resulting series of arena events exceeded the client’s expectations, Featherstone said, while delighting millions of viewers who watched the livestreaming program.
“Henry Ford said that any seemingly daunting project is possible if you divide it into small pieces,” he said. “Everyone on this project had their piece. Even with a very tight load-in and three intense days of shows, the Executive Visions team triumphed.”
Photography by Suzanne Teresa