John Lewis – Chairman’s Award for Excellence

SFL have worked with John Lewis for a number of years, working alongside the expertise of Nick Watts Digital. We were asked to design and provide a water garden themed event for their Awards dinner and drinks reception, to reflect the gardens of the Leckford Estate, once the home of John Spedan Lewis. SFL delivered a full video, lighting and audio solution, along with custom furniture, table centres and complete theming.

The guests arrived to a warmly lit garden path lined with lanterns and lit with Smartbats. The giant conifers were flooded with light from our City colours as they arrived through a lit archway in to the drinks reception venue.

The room was warmly lit with uplighters, breakup gobos and the glow from the LED poseur tables. The custom build bar blended in with the garden them being disguised as a hedge and an 11m wall being filled with a widescreen image of the gardens and the hut where Spedan came up with his best ideas. L’Acoustics 8XT’s blended in to the background to allow for clear speech and later background music. Guests were sectioned off from the main venue until the big reveal through the garden arch wowed them.

The first site guests would see is out 7m widescreen with a 4 x Canon Xeed WUX 6010 blend situated in our hedge fronted set. The round central truss hung in the centre of the room full of cobs for lighting the stage, and hung pea lights and ivy strewn down to give atmosphere and depth to the room.

The left of the room is 15m of windows of which we filmed and projected a huge widescreen image on using our amazing 31,000 lumens 4K Barco UDX Laser projectors. Content was shown on the main screen and the windows all night including a spectacular firework display ending in a firework starting at one end of the windows and whizzing across to the main screen to explode. All the incredible content was created by Nick Watts Digital.

A d&b system surrounded the room with music and clear speech for announcing the awards. Whilst Smartbats and Source Four juniors flooded the room with colour.

SFL provided the ornate table centres consisting on floating flowers and candles in cylindrical vases on cut off logs. Candles covered the logs adding low level light to the individual tables. And the walls were covered in Ivy and a huge selection of trees and plants directly from the Leckford Estate. SFL used approx. 1.5km of ivy across the whole venue.

The event as a whole was a huge success and we had a very pleased client: “What you helped deliver last week was amazing and I can’t thank you enough.”