Angela Lopera strives to transform every client’s vision of what they want their event to look like into an actual grand event. All of Angela’s work exists behind the scenes, but she knows that with every drawing revision, email, conference call, and schedule change, in the end, she and her team will have created something quite spectacular. Each client, technical director, and producer has a different vision that they want their event to evolve into, and she gets to be a part of that evolution. Seeing that vision at the end of the day is what Angela loves so much about her career.
In planning an event for Tall Tree Productions, Angela and her team transformed a dinner-gala seating for 2,040 attendees into 1,765 for the general-session, removing huge sections of the dinner riser in just hours. For each event, there is no exact science to coordinate such a quick turnaround and transformation. On this occasion, every stagehand, forklift operator, and venue chair-and-table–placement/removal crew worked together to create a perfectly smooth conversion in a very small transitional space. It goes back to working closely with producers and her team, which enabled a seamless transition.
Angela believes that tiered seating is the key to any successful event. She believes that any attendee who enters the room should have a good seat and sees the trend of a more interactive stage presence. Events focus on showing more interactive scenes on the stage. Angela believes that tiered seating is here to stay and allows a great seat to all attendees.
When asked what events she would most like to bring InProduction into, Angela replied, “An event such as the Super Bowl or the Olympics” — an event where she can use her creative and organizational skills to dive into a wide array of seating and scenic elements.
In our world, which is focused on accomplishing things with just the press of a button, clients want to see their first inclinations developed as quickly as possible, which means the timeline the team is given to produce these events is growing smaller and smaller. Over the past 15 years that Angela has been with InProduction, she has typically received an idea from a client with a four- to six-month window to work through the production. But today, in this fast-paced world, the time to bring these events together has become significantly shorter.
“Our whole world, technology — everything — is moving at lightning speed,” Angela notes, and creating these shows in accordance with that lightning speed is where Angela’s work is headed in the future. In these new tightened windows that Angela and her team are given, Angela will continue to advance, evolve, and ultimately transform each client’s first idea into a magnificent event.