Working with a talented AV and staging partner is the first step in ensuring your meeting will truly have impact. Have a tight budget? EPN shares 5 cost effective ways they can help create a stage with a wow factor for your next event or meeting.

Lighting is typically your best bang for your buck. Even some basic uplighing can transform your stage or room dramatically, especially if you use LED lights so that you can change the colors and look throughout the event.

Use gray drape instead of black, it takes light so much better adding a new dimension of design to your stage, and looks better on camera.

Pixel mapping is a video display technique used to “map” images across large or dynamic surfaces.  This may include large objects such as the side of a building, or anything with an unusual shape, such as a cube or a column in a room. Designing a wide-screen look combined with a palette of various shapes and sizes on which to project your video creates a dramatic visual effect.

When considering event staging ideas, a wide-screen blend spanning the front of the event room gives you a variety of scenic options in which you are also able to present videos and content. Wide-screen blends can be used in conjunction with pixel mapping, or as a set look all its own. You are going to have screens and projectors in the room, why not do a single large format screen (10’x30’, 15’x45’, 20’x60’) and multipurpose the technology as part of your scenic design.

Modular sets are cost effective both from a rental perspective and in regards to the required labor to install/remove as opposed to hard sets. Modular sets tend to be a combination of small scenic pieces that can be put together in a variety of shapes and designs, offering a lot of flexibility. They are typically light weight, easy to transport and build. There are a number of options of soft, modular set pieces that take light extremely well, and are fairly inexpensive to rent/ship/build.