For Brite Ideas co-founder and creative director Greg Christy, no two events are ever the same—but the Brite Ideas bar of excellence is unchanging. The Orange County-based event and live production company brings 45 full-time staff, three production trucks, and nearly four decades of live event experience to every job, from intimate charity galas to the global industry’s most high-profile stages. This spring, Brite Ideas was tapped by Kapture Global for full technical production of Pollstar’s—the definitive live music trade publication—annual conference and awards show at the Loews Hollywood Hotel. Experts at using technology to deliver the narrative and vision of each client, this was exactly the kind of complex, multi-layered event the company was built for, and one that would put Astera lighting at the heart of the production.
Each year, Pollstar Live! spans three days of programming catering to the live music industry’s top professionals, culminating in a 42-category awards show honoring the architects of live entertainment, with past honorees including music legend Stevie Nicks and record producer Irving Azoff. The award ceremony is a spectacle, with Brite Ideas running the show, complete with brilliant LED walls, captivating lighting, sound, and stunning set design across every phase of the event. “We’re designers who just happen to own gear,” Christy says of Brite Ideas’ ethos. Every technical decision stems from the story the client needs to tell, and the gear has to be flexible enough to serve that story across wildly different contexts.
This year, 72 Astera QuikPunch LED spotlight Fresnels were added to the arsenal. Christy’s team planned to use them as up-lights throughout the conference. Special care was given to their configurations in the main ballroom, which hosted the conference’s biggest talks, and would become the site of the awards show. That ballroom would undergo a dramatic transformation on the last day of the conference, into a stage on par with the great music acts it would host that evening.
Preparing for the multi-day run, Christy’s team wired each QuikPunch for consistent power, while the light’s native zoom and yoke allowed precise illumination that framed the LED screens and accented the walls. Most importantly, with Astera’s Titan Engine color science, the QuikPunch offers extreme color fidelity. Matching exact client brand colors across conference programming is the kind of attention to detail that supports a flawless presentation.
The challenge wasn’t just scaling for one of the largest gatherings in the music business — it called for transformation. When the conference’s final session ended at 3:00 p.m., the ballroom had to become an awards show by 7:30 p.m.
Then, four and a half hours later, with packed seats, big bright LED displays, and the Pollstar blue ambient lighting, the conference was kicked up a level. The ballroom shed its daytime skin, primed for a night that honored the year’s biggest names in live music: Oasis, Metallica, Kendrick Lamar/SZA, The Weeknd, Benson Boone, Chris Stapleton, Lainey Wilson, Bad Bunny, and more.
“Forty years in, and the best shows still come down to the same thing: the right tool in the hands of someone who knows the story they’re trying to tell,” Christy says. For a company’s reputation built on closing the gap between a client’s vision and what actually lands in the room, that’s not a small thing.
