Last Night Fayetteville Fest A Celebration in Technology

On the surface, Last Night Fayetteville was a classic New Year’s celebration. The square was blocked off to make way for a street party for as many as 2,000 people, and when Fayetteville’s version of the ball — a hog-shaped piece of fiberglass wrapped in LEDs — was dropped 75 feet, plenty of people responded with a sip of champagne.

The days of tearing tickets, lighting fuses by hand, plugging in and carrying clipboards are not over, but they almost are, and nowhere is that more evident than at Last Night. The event employed multiple pieces of software and Web-based platforms, and many components were tied together over wireless connections.

The multi-venue event featured music, dance, spoken word, Burlesque and even drag. With its fourth year in the books, organizers have seemingly perfected the art of using technology to produce a big event with lots of moving pieces, and important organizations have taken notice. The Chancellor Hotel, the Walton Arts Center and the Arkansas Arts Council, among many others, were sponsors. 

Event planning, according to market analyst Ibis World, is a $6 billion U.S. industry that employs about 352,000 people. Experts in the field say that the industry will continue to be transformed by technology — technology that could go way beyond the online tools and mobile apps used by Last Night.

Bonnie Fedchock, executive director of the Maryland-based National Association for Catering and Events, says there’s no telling what the future has in store.

“Technology will continue to be more of a focus as all companies work to deliver greater value to customers,” Fedchock said. “As our younger customers and event planners enter the industry, we will continue to change, especially as the generation that grew up with technology completely incorporates it within the event. Perhaps we will see robots serving food, holograms with interactive events, or printers creating custom food at stations.”

 

Eventbrite and Volunteers

In 2011, when Last Night’s executive director Lauren Embree began planning the inaugural event, she did what a lot of people do — she searched the Internet for ideas and inspiration.

She found plenty, chief of which was San Francisco-based startup Eventbrite, an all-purpose, online event-promotions system that in 2013 processed $1 billion in gross ticket sales for attendees in 187 countries.

Eventbrite shares information across social media, exposing a gala like Last Night to millions of potential attendees. People from more than a dozen states go to Last Night, something Embree attributes to the Eventbrite platform and the ease with which people can purchase tickets.

Once a ticket is bought through Eventbrite, it is emailed to the buyer as a PDF that can be printed out and scanned at the door, or an attendee can simply have the ticket scanned straight from their phone.

Last Night has employed Eventbrite for four years, and year in and year out, the platform has proved useful.

“They’ve been getting better every year and there’s always something new,” Embree said.

Moreover, the detailed analytics produced by Eventbrite became an important source of data when Last Night applied for, and received, a three-year, $45,000 grant from the Arkansas Arts Council.

“It was a big deal for us [to get the grant],” she said. “That really laid the foundation for us to grow as an organization.”

Out of the 100 Last Night volunteers for the 2014 event, six of them were equipped with iPad minis, rented out from a New York company called Flying Connected. The devices were used for walk-up ticketing, check-ins, and ringing up merchandise sales with Square, a credit card app.

The volunteers themselves were recruited and organized in part by using social media and the Austin, Texas-based online service VolunteerSpot, which, according to the company, reaches more than 3.5 million volunteers in the U.S. and Canada.

At ease with the technology and supported by an important sponsor like the Arkansas Arts Council, Embree sees no end in sight for Last Night.

“As long as we keep getting an audience and people want to do it, that’s exciting for us,” she said.

 

Hog Drop

The centerpiece of Last Night was an eight-foot, reinforced fiberglass hog that was dropped at midnight from about 75 feet. In year’s past, the hog was decorated with paint. But for 2014, organizers did something much more ambitious — they wrapped the hog with 1,200 pre-programmed LED pixels.

The pixels were programmed for two light shows, one a basic loop so that revelers could take their photo with the hog before it was raised, and a second, advanced 10-minute light show programmed for the main event — the Hog Drop.

To create the light shows, Last Night’s production manager, David Embree, built a video using Sony Vegas software, and then overlaid the video with the screen capture element in another piece of software, LED Edit. The shows were downloaded to an SD card and plugged into a T-1000S control box, which was then mounted in the belly of the hog.

Using a laptop, the light shows took days to build.

“We wanted something dynamic and impactful and something viewable at 75 feet,” said Embree, Lauren’s husband. “Everybody is going for bigger, brighter and louder, so we decided to step it up.”

While dropping a ball is a widespread tradition epitomized by the annual event at Times Square in New York City, communities across the country prefer objects more representative of their locale. In Atlanta, they drop a peach, in Maine a sardine, in Ohio a sausage, and in Wisconsin, a cheese wedge. 

As production manager, David Embree was also responsible for the main stage at the Fayetteville Town Center, where headliners Brick Fields and the Chosen Ones, Shawn James and the Shapeshifters, and Randall Shreve and the Sideshow performed.

In another nod to technology, David Embree did not power the main stage with a traditional front-of-the-house sound system, which requires the familiar black box filled with equipment. Instead, he used the groundbreaking Behringer X-32 Rack, which uses software to condense all the functions of traditional sound equipment into one small box that can be employed right next to the stage.

The Behringer has 40 input channels and can be controlled remotely over a wireless connection using an iPad or iPhone. In David Embree’s case, he controlled the main stage with a Google Nexus 7, and did sound checks from various locations within the Town Center ballroom.

A key feature of the Behringer is that it does away with “the snake,” the large cable traditionally used to connect the soundboard in the front to the stage in the back.

“It’s a fantastic toy,” David Embree said.

The main point of using technology, he said, is not to be fancy, but to save time, manpower and precious funds for an organization with only four employees.

“We always look to leverage technology to minimize the workload,” he said. “We’re a very small team and this is a big endeavor. We would not be able to do this at the budget point without the technology.”

 

Electronic Matches

The fireworks display was in the hands of Riverside Fireworks of Siloam Springs. Owner Tim Reed has been in the industry since 1999, and when he first started, displays were lit by hand using a flare. A lot has changed.

These days, his shows are built using Finale Fireworks software. The show is then loaded onto a flash drive, which is then loaded into a handheld control device used to cue the show.

The wireless system sparks a battery which in turn ignites an electronic match. For this year’s event, Reed fired off about 3,000 shots for an eight-minute show from on top of the Town Center. The C-Class fireworks, which included the Pyro Cocktail, Universal Darkness, Ride the Lightning and Western Sky, were part of a show that took as many as eight hours to build on his computer.

Reed is part of a $328 million display fireworks industry in the U.S., according to the American Pyrotechnics Association, and he is also one of 323 licensed individuals or companies authorized to stage fireworks displays in Arkansas, according to the Arkansas State Police.

In addition to Last Night, Reed also orchestrates the fireworks at University of Arkansas football games, Cross Church, the city of Siloam Springs, and College of the Ozarks in Missouri.

While the Last Night display was more or less standard, with big bursts and holiday colors, Reed said he can build custom shows accompanied by music or shows that highlight a particular landscape.

“It’s come a long way,” he said.