Every now and again an event comes together that really stands out from the others. This year for the Sickles High School homecoming dance, we had a wonderful time creating hollywood themed balloon decorations. This included a movie clapper entrance, a star tunnel entrance, a foil star dance floor, and decorative foil stars over their tables as well. As an added bonus, we included some simple foil star columns as well so that students could find the registration tables and entrance to the ballroom.
Speaking of the ballroom, this event took place in the USF Marshall Center at the Tampa campus and we had a wonderful time setting up and cutting up with the USF crew. They were all fantastic members of the staff and they were eager to help whenever needed and sometimes when they weren’t needed at all. We love when a venue looks great, but it is even better when the staff goes above and beyond in whatever they do. We only wish all our venues were as easy to work with as the ballroom that the University of South Florida.
In prepping for this event, we had over 1,000 pounds of framing and bases that were carried into the ballroom. We had 5 staff members put everything together in about 6 hours, a total of 30 man hours on site. That, of course, is in addition to the 50 man hours of prep work that was done in the office prior to the start of the preparation on location. This particular event had allowed us to create three custom matching star frames for the entrance tunnel and allowed some additional creativity with the dance floor. As it was not a perfect circle, we were able to incorporate all of that math and geometry we learned while we were in school. As the stage this year extended much farther than normal for the DJ, we were tasked at finding out the proper locations for the eight balloon columns on the perimeter of the dance floor. After that, we used our knowledge of balloons as well as the math we used to figure out the correct spacing for each of the balloon foil stars over the dance floor.
This hollywood themed event had enough paparazzi to keep the party hopping. This video montage from Firefly photography was put together after the event as well to show off some of the great photos taken during the event. These were all photos taken at a backdrop and open photo booth area so that the students could feel like hollywood stars and do not feature our balloon decor, but that’s okay. We know the students loved the decorations and some even tried to take a column with them when they left. Lucky for us, they did not have the man power to pick them up and carry them out. One more reason we keep heavy bases for our homecoming decorations.
