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Corona: Special Event Services hosts ‘Gray Room Sessions’ with Elation lights
The Covid shutdown in March 2020 provided Jeff Cranfill - vice president and co-founder of Special Event Services (SES) - the chance to realize a long held ambition for the Gray Room at the company’s headquarter facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“I had been looking at this spot in our warehouse for literally thirty years,” Cranfill shares. “When our Social Media and Marketing Director Rebekah Carney came to me with the idea for music sessions in order to help furloughed SES crew and local musicians who don’t have work, I had it all in my head and knew exactly what to do.”
Cranfill and his SES crew used their inventory of gear, including Elation lighting fixtures, to turn the space into a performance area. The SES headquarter facility is housed in an old tobacco auction warehouse with a brick wall that runs all the way around it. Lighting the brick wall and wooden columns made it possible to create a warm, cozy look.
“We decided to shoot at 3200 Kelvin color temperature,” Cranfill explains. “I looked around our shop for non-incandescent sources and realized we had a lot of Elation products that are 3200 K base LED. I then started metering them to find they all matched in color temperature.”
Used to graze the brick wall are Elation DTW Bar 1000 variable white LED battens. In order to emphasize the fact that the performance is taking place in a warehouse, vintage wood columns are uplit using Elation Cuepix Blinder WW2 lights. They give the room a bit of ambient light as well, while the ADJ Z100 3K LED Par provides key lighting and backlighting.
SES released the first of the ‘Gray Room Sessions’ on YouTube in early May with a new session posted every Friday evening at 8 p.m. EDT in the U.S. All sessions feature different artists in a 15-25 minute format. Viewers can follow the artist, share their music and also tip.
SES is also raising funds for others in the live music industry by collecting donations through a local non-profit organization. Tax-deductible donations can be made to the charitable foundation MusiCares and SES through Pure Heart Ministries. Half of all proceeds go to MusiCares with the other half going to employees of SES who have lost work during the pandemic. As an additional help to each artist, SES gives each performer a free copy of their video that can be used for his or her own promotional purposes.
SES plans to continue the ‘Gray Room Sessions’ after Covid and hope to branch out into other forms of entertainment like visual artists, dance, etc. “Another thing that’s been great about this is that we’re learning so much as a production company about how to do something that isn’t a regular practice for us. It’s a new skill set and I get excited that we’re doing something new and innovative with technology,” concludes Cranfill, adding that SES are working to partner with a local radio station to play the ‘Gray Room Sessions’ on a regular weekly radio program with a podcast also in the making.
SES has also recently sponsored two other online music events using Elation fixtures: ‘The Clubhouse Live’, an EDM music festival streaming on YouTube and other platforms, using Elation eNode-4 network nodes; and ‘Hellooo TV’, a series of online concerts out of Nashville, TN, using Elation SixPar 200s.
Apart from Jeff Cranfill and Rebekah Carney, the ‘Gray Room Sessions’ team also includes Video Editor/Motion Graphics Designer Matt Szczygiel and Video Director Dusty Beach.
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