How we scope a project —
and what actually moves the number.

In rough order of leverage. Every line is a question about your event that changes how much equipment, crew and time it takes to produce — which is the whole of what an estimate is.

• Headcount, and how they sit

  Headcount sets the room and the room sets almost everything else. But capacity alone does not say where the last chair goes: banquet rounds occupy floor that theater rows do not, so the same crowd sits deeper into the space. Depth sets screen width on the 8:1 rule, width sets the video package, and the video package pulls the processing and a share of the power with it. Seating decides the audio design too — a deep room and a wide room of the same capacity are two different coverage problems.

• Room size, shape and trim height

  Square footage is the least useful of the three. Shape decides whether coverage wants a line array or a distributed system. Ceiling and trim height decide how big a wall can be and whether the lighting can get above it — in a low ballroom that, not the panel count, is what caps the build. Trim height is also the number most often missing from a brief and the one that most often changes a scope after the fact.

• Rigging points, or the floor

  Certified points over the stage, how many, and what each is rated for. With them the wall and the lighting fly, the floor stays yours and the build is shorter. Without them everything stands in ground support — towers, base plates, ballast, engineered for the load — which is more structure, more crew hours, and floor taken out of the seating plan you were going to sell. Same show, two materially different builds, and the venue decides which one you are doing.

• The load-in window, and the night before

  The most under-appreciated line on the list. Whether you have the room the night before decides whether rehearsal happens in the evening with the room empty or in the hours before doors. A compressed window does not simply add hours: it adds crew, because work that would run in sequence has to run in parallel. It also puts a ceiling on how complex a running order can safely be, which is a production decision rather than a logistics one.

• Show power

  Whether house power at the room carries the show, or whether a tie-in, or a generator and distro, travel with us. Outdoors on a lawn, a deck or in a tent it is always the second. An LED wall is not a fixed load either — it draws what the content makes it draw — so the calculation is done against the worst frame in the show rather than the average one. Audio, video, lighting, tent HVAC and catering all land on the same service, so it gets calculated once, against the total, by the people who have to make it work.

• LED size and pitch

  Wall width comes off the furthest seat; pixel pitch comes off the nearest one, and off whether a camera is shooting the wall and whether the slides carry dense type or tables. Those are two independent questions and most briefs answer neither. A wall is built to the shape of your stage rather than to a catalogue size, so cabinet count, structure, processing and power all follow from the drawing rather than from a product name.

• Crew size and days on site

  Crew is a function of the build, the programme and the window — not of the guest count — and it is usually the largest single variable in a production. Days multiply it: a sales kickoff running two to four days holds crew, room and rehearsal for every one of those days, and an overnight build or an over-length show day changes how the same crew has to be scheduled around it.

• Rehearsal hours

  A multi-segment general session takes a minimum of four hours of technical rehearsal. That is scope, and it is the line most often cut to make a number smaller — which works right up until the morning it does not. Where the rehearsal cannot exist in the schedule, the honest answer is a simpler running order, not the same show with less preparation behind it.

• What the room has to look like

  Stock staging and drape, or a shop-built scenic environment; branding beyond the general session; registration and lounge areas dressed or bare. Fabrication is a lead-time item measured in weeks, and it is usually the line that decides how early the whole production has to lock.

A production estimate is design, equipment and labour, plus the days those things occupy. Reading one in those three parts is the fastest way to compare two documents that look nothing alike.

Four items rarely in a planner’s first budget and always in the real one. None of them is optional, and every one is easier to plan than to discover.

This is a choice rather than evasion, and it is worth stating plainly — because the alternative is worse for you than a twenty-minute call is.

Three scheduling facts about South Florida that change what is available and what it takes to deliver. All three are about time, and time is the one input that cannot be bought back at the end.

With these in hand a scope can come back the same day. Without them we are guessing, and a guess has to be padded — which is exactly what neither of us wants on the document.

• The date, or the shortlist of dates

  Including whether the date is fixed or the programme is. One of the two is usually movable, and knowing which changes what we can offer you — particularly between November and April, when the room and the night before it are the scarce items.

• The venue and the room, by name

  Name the property and the room and we work from the building’s own published dimensions, rigging plot and power, then tell you what the room will not do. Not settled yet? Send the shortlist. Comparing two rooms against the same programme is one of the more useful things we do before anybody signs anything.

• Headcount and the seating plan

  Rounds or rows, and where the stage sits. That gives us the furthest seat and the nearest one, which between them set screen width, pixel pitch and the audio design. A capacity figure on its own sets none of them.

• The run of show, even in draft

  Segments, who is on, what is on screen, what has to land. The shape of the programme sets the control package, the lighting states, the crew and the rehearsal demand. A rough agenda is worth more to a scope than a precise equipment list is.

• The load-in window, and the night before

  When you get the room, when you have to be out, and what is in the room either side of you. If you do not know, say so — it is a question we can ask the venue, and the answer moves the crew before it moves anything else.

• Whether any of it is outdoors, and whether anyone has walked it

  A tent, terrace, deck or lawn brings a structure, a weather call with a decision time, flooring, HVAC, generators and possibly a permit package. And if nobody has walked the space, tell us: we will walk it, and that survey is the difference between a scope and an estimate with assumptions inside it.

Every driver above is written up in full somewhere on this site. These three are the deep ones.