Venue: Fairmont Century Plaza, Los Angeles
Event type: Awards gala with live entertainment and cocktail reception
Services: LED walls, audio, lighting, video, crew, power distribution
The Los Angeles Urban League’s 49th Annual Awards Gala is one of LA’s signature nonprofit events — hundreds of guests, live entertainment, a formal awards program, and an outdoor cocktail reception. The production had to match the occasion.
ProCore handled the full technical production across two distinct spaces at the Fairmont Century Plaza: a grand ballroom for the main gala and an outdoor area for the pre-event reception. Every department — LED, audio, lighting, video, and power — operated under a single production plan with a dedicated crew running each system.
This wasn’t a single-room setup. The production spanned indoor and outdoor environments, each with different technical requirements. And the setup needed to happen in 1 day.
The ballroom needed three large-format LED walls as the visual centerpiece — one 29-foot main stage wall flanked by two 24-foot side screens. That’s 426 LED tiles, nearly 10,000 pounds of structure when ground-stacked, and 70 amps of dedicated 208V power just for the walls.
The outdoor cocktail reception needed its own standalone sound system — separate from the ballroom — with wireless capability for live entertainment and speeches.
The lighting design called for 35 moving lights, 30 LED pars, 18 battery-powered uplights, custom gobos, and a grandMA3 console to tie it all together. The audio system was a flown L’Acoustics Kara II rig with 10 wireless microphone channels running through a Yamaha CL3 console.
All of this had to load in, build, program, rehearse, perform, and strike within a tight venue window — two days of setup, the show, and an overnight teardown.
Everything started with the production plan.
LED walls: Three ROE Visual BO3 walls at 3.47mm pixel pitch — sharp enough for camera-ready content at close viewing distances. Brompton Tessera SX40 processors handled all three walls with fiber-optic signal distribution. Two dedicated power distros, full CAM-lok runs from the venue’s house power, and 400 sandbags to ballast the ground-stacked structure. 42 spare tiles on-site in case of any panel issues.
Audio: The L’Acoustics Kara II system covered the main ballroom — a concert-grade rig designed for clear, even coverage across a large seated audience. Eight JBL monitors handled stage and presenter feeds. Ten Shure QLXD4 wireless channels ran through active antenna splitters for clean RF performance across the hotel’s shared wireless spectrum. A separate outdoor system with six LD Systems ICOA speakers and its own mixer handled the cocktail reception independently.
Lighting: A grandMA3 console controlled 35 Varilite VL3600 profiles for stage washes and specials, 12 ETC Source Four Lekos for key light, 30 Martin Rush Par 2 LED pars for color washes, and 3 Chauvet Strike Array blinders for audience energy during live performances. Custom gobos added branded texture to the room. 18 battery-powered Freedom Par uplights lit the perimeter without a single cable on the floor.
Crew: 30 crew members directed over the production window — LED operators, a lighting designer, lighting engineers, A1 and A2 audio engineers, setup crew, teardown crew, and a job lead managing the overnight strike. The team that planned the show ran the show.
The gala ran without a hitch. Three LED walls displayed content flawlessly throughout the awards program and live entertainment. Audio stayed clean across 10 wireless channels with zero interference. The lighting design transformed the Fairmont’s ballroom into something that felt purpose-built for the event. And the outdoor reception had its own complete sound system so the two spaces operated independently without competing.
The overnight strike had the ballroom cleared and the venue restored by morning.
A gala at this scale isn’t one big problem — it’s dozens of small ones that need to be solved in advance. Three LED walls need dedicated power planning. Ten wireless mics in a hotel need frequency coordination. Indoor and outdoor spaces need independent systems with their own crews. And the whole thing needs to come together on a schedule the venue dictates, not the one you’d prefer.
That’s what a production plan is for. Not a gear list — a plan. Who owns what, what signal goes where, what happens when something unexpected comes up, and how it all comes down when it’s over.
The LA Urban League trusted ProCore to handle the technical side of their biggest event of the year. We planned it to work before it happened — and it did.
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| Category | Highlights |
|---|---|
| LED | 3 walls (29′ x 11′, 2x 24′ x 13′), 426 ROE BO3 tiles, Brompton Tessera SX40 processing |
| Audio | L’Acoustics Kara II main system, 10 Shure wireless channels, separate outdoor cocktail system |
| Lighting | grandMA3 console, 35 Varilite VL3600, 12 ETC Lekos, 30 LED pars, 18 wireless uplights, custom gobos |
| Video | 4x 65″ 4K displays |
| Power | Dedicated 208V service, dual power distros, full CAM-lok distribution |
| Crew | 30 crew members over 1-day build + show + overnight strike |
