SAMMYS (Sales and Marketing Awards)

In the timeshare industry, Holiday Inn Club Vacations became known for our annual sales and marketing award show (SAMMYS) hosted at Hard Rock in Orlando, FL. These shows were no small affairs. Each year, we would pair rock-and-roll headliners — like Bret Michaels (Poison), Eddie Money, Scott Stapp (Creed), and Steve Harwell (Smash Mouth) — with the backing of members from John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band to perform their hits for our sales and marketing teams while celebrating the team's accomplishments.

My role was to act as the Technical Director during the concert — giving direction to both the HCV team and calling queues for graphic/light packages for the staff at Hard Rock — and help develop the visual direction of the motion graphics leading up to the event. Graphics would be a mix of pre-rendered walk-on graphics done in After Effects and dynamic background graphics that would react to the performance (built with Magic Music Visuals). I would use a mobile Blackmagic production switcher setup to go from hold graphics, to presentation PowerPoint/videos, to motion graphics from multiple sources.

While the shows were physically a lot to pull off (pre-show load-in was a little before noon, and we wouldn't leave until well after midnight), they were really fun to create and allowed the team to try new things and play with new A/V toys. In another life, I would have probably gone into stage production.