Nine metres of black, floor to ceiling

The brief

Allianz needed a gala dinner in Da Nang for approximately 300 guests, a single evening carrying recognition, hospitality and brand presence for a corporate audience that attends a great many corporate dinners.

The constraint was the room. A hotel ballroom arrives with its own character: patterned carpet, hotel chandeliers, function-room walls and a ceiling grid that reads as neither neutral nor premium. Left visible, that architecture would set the tone of every photograph taken that night. The brief was to produce an evening that felt like a purpose-built venue rather than a room the client had rented.

What we delivered

iMAGINE Events Asia produced the gala end to end, with one bilingual lead owning the scenic design, technical package, supplier contracting, rehearsal and live show-calling.

• Full ballroom star-cloth wrap, black star cloth around the entire perimeter of the ballroom, rigged to roughly nine metres, taking the hotel walls out of view and replacing them with a lit black field.
• Main stage, backdrop and staging, a built stage with a branded backdrop, sized for awards, speeches and entertainment, with clean sightlines from every table.
• Photo-booth and reception zones, multiple branded activation points across the pre-dinner reception, designed so guests moved between them rather than queueing at one.
• Branded hotel check-in booth, an Allianz-branded desk at the hotel arrival point, so the event began when guests checked in rather than when they entered the ballroom.
• Gift bags, specified, sourced and distributed as part of the same branded journey.
• Full show production, audio, lighting, vision, run-of-show and live show-calling for the awards and entertainment programme.

The programme

One evening, staged as a continuous journey from hotel arrival to the close of the gala.

• Arrival. Guests met the branded check-in booth at the hotel, establishing the identity before anyone reached the event floor.
• Reception. Pre-dinner drinks across multiple branded photo-booth and reception zones, with guests circulating between activation points.
• Doors. The ballroom opened onto the fully wrapped room, black star cloth to nine metres, the stage lit as the only focal point.
• Gala. Seated dinner, awards, speeches and entertainment, called live from the production desk.
• Departure. Gift bags handed out as guests left, closing the branded journey where it started.

Scale and specifications

The scale of the build, and the technical package our crew installed, operated and struck.

• Scenic, full-perimeter black star cloth rigged to approximately nine metres, main stage build and branded backdrop, plus booth and reception-zone structures.
• Rigging, perimeter rigging engineered to the ballroom's fixing points and load limits, installed and certified before dressing.
• Lighting, stage key and wash, table and room lighting balanced against the black field, and separate lighting states for reception, dinner, awards and entertainment.
• Audio and vision, line-array system for speeches and entertainment, with screen and content playback for the awards sequence.
• Branding, hotel check-in booth, photo-booth backdrops, reception-zone graphics and gift bags, produced to one specification.
• Crew, bilingual stage management, technical operators and setup crew on site from load-in through strike.

The outcome

The ballroom stopped looking like a ballroom. With nine metres of black star cloth around the full perimeter, the only lit surfaces in the room were the ones Allianz had paid to build, the stage, the backdrop and the tables, and every photograph from the night framed the brand rather than the hotel.

Extending the identity to the hotel check-in booth and the gift bags meant guests met Allianz on arrival and left holding it, rather than encountering the brand only for the hours they were seated. It is the approach we now propose whenever a client's venue is fixed but the impression it makes is not.