Progroup AG Gala & Ceremony

… the reins being handed over to a new generation. The manufacturer of containerboard and corrugated cardboard from Landau in the Palatinate region of Germany invited stakeholders to the event held at the Leipzig exhibition centre. The company’s employees, customers and business partners witnessed the passing of the baton from the firm’s founder Jürgen Heindl to his son Maximilian. The symbolic setting was a spaceship, which lifted off to orbit the Earth from Leipzig Messe’s “Glass Hall”.

The project teams from Progroup and the Munich-based Zweiplan agency had spent two and half years developing and preparing the event for the 2,300 attendees. On 5th November the invited guests made their way to their “beamports” at the time printed on their boarding pass. Hall 1 was then filled with flashes of light and dark rumbling: a little later attendees had the impression of being in a hangar onboard a spaceship; in the next room they looked onto a huge command bridge. Through a curved window, the guests were able to look down on planet Earth as if from orbit. Unique moments such as these occurred throughout the whole evening, which was accompanied by music from the Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the rock band Karat. Alexander Hennig and his creative team had developed ten individually designed show elements to match the theme of the change of generation. The performances achieved Broadway standard and were met with an enthusiastic reception from the audience.

We were commissioned to provide perfect support for the production with our technical equipment. Our brief encompassed event technology and kinetics as well as special effects with pyrotechnics. We therefore implemented the lighting, audio and video systems and also equipped the workstations of the simultaneous interpreters. The time available for setting up presented us with a challenge: in just four days we installed over 400 chain hoists in the trusses, which measured a total of almost three kilometres in length and also provided space for more than 1,000 spotlights and 120 loudspeakers. 26 projectors and eight cameras provided the moving images for a curved screen measuring 81 x 6.5 metres.