Park Events
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visual impact from the front gate through to the main crowd areas and the performance spaces really make the event.
5. Target your event to a specific audience. This not only helps to get media attention, but brings in an audience that may not typically come to your park.
6. Evaluate the event afterwards to determine what worked and what didn’t. This helps everyone to decide if it is worth doing again. By repeating successful events and keeping all the materials to use in successive years, you can spread the cost. Also you now have a stock of resources, making it easier to restage the event next year.
Legoland Florida’s Bricktacular Chritsmas event
Top tips There are several elements that need to be considered when planning an event at a theme or amusement park: 1. Create an annual calendar of events, mixing the obvious periods such as Christmas and Halloween with different types of events in the traditional slow periods. The latter boosts annual attendance and profitability.
2. Should it be an event included as part of the normal entrance fee or a hard ticket event? Knott’s Scary Farm, and other Halloween events like it, work well because the park is closed at the normal hour then reopened later in the evening as a ticketed event. The event also utilises the drama of the night to create atmosphere. One advantage of hard ticket events is that the additional revenue from the event’s ticket sales allows for bigger budgets for production.
3. Make sure the event lives up to the hype. It takes a good deal of production, and costs, to add enough of the elements necessary to provide a different experience to your guests. If it is going to be a event, make it special!
4 Good events have multiple, but related elements. Many things should be special throughout the park including street entertainment, shows and concerts. A parade must relate to the theme, and even the food dishes too. The
A lifetime of live entertainment achievements
“No one in our industry has created and produced a broader variety of shows around the world," declares the Themed Entertainment Association. Such is Ron Miziker’s live entertainment pedigree that the TEA awarded him the Buzz Price Thea Award for a lifetime of outstanding achievements in 2015. Miziker founded his own production company in 1984 and his clients have included television
networks, leading corporations, presidents, kings and queens, a sultan, the Olympics, World Cup and Super Bowl, as well as hotel developers, Disney, Universal Studios, Radio City Music Hall, Lotte World, Spain’s Expo ’92, Port Aventura and, most recently, a major casino in Macau. During his tenure at Disney, Miziker was responsible for the development of many original shows,
parades, revues, dinner theatre shows, character shows, fireworks and laser extravaganzas at parks including Disneyland, EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland. After a period away from the company, Miziker returned to Disney Studios as producer of network television programmes and eventually named vice- president of original programmes and productions for the launch of the Disney Channel. “Whether developing show concepts, writing or producing – or passing on his know-how and
entertainment ideas to new generations – Ron Miziker has earned this Thea recognition for over 40 years of creating first-class fun and spectacle for audiences around the world,” notes the TEA’s Thea Awards committee.
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7. If planning a new park or area of a park, dedicate some of the construction money to things such as building in power and control lines so that sound and light systems can be easily be placed there when you stage an event. I’ve been intrigued by some of the villages and towns in Germany where their public squares are all set for events and festivals. Built into the paving are utility boxes over the entire square. When it comes to time for the event, canopies are placed over these boxes and water, electricity and sewer are instantly available. I suggest the same should be done in theme parks.
8 Be creative with the event. Don’t just do the expected. If your event has the same elements as all the other attractions in your area, your chance for success is diminished. Sometimes the right “twist” makes it special. One year at Knott’s, I was unable to get a headliner for the ticketed New Year’s Eve party, so we advertised that at midnight we would have the world’s largest group dance …all 30,000 guests dancing together to the same song to celebrate the New Year. It worked. The media caught on to the idea, our event sold out before any of the competition, and I didn’t have to pay out a lot of money to a headliner. Most importantly, everyone had a fun time, and the dancing went on well into the early hours!
Show time! I found that successful events build upon themselves every year and get bigger and bigger both in added elements and attendance. Our surveys showed that some people wait to return to the park until the added value of the event they particularly enjoy returns. For those with the responsibility of staging events, I stress
the importance of thinking about the project the same as one would a show. For the audience attending, the experience must include a beginning, middle and end. Concentrate on that first impression as well as what will be the guest’s final impression. Often these are what they remember most about their visit and what they tell their friends about, but the middle experience cannot be forgotten either. Again, like a show, this middle must provide a sequence of highs and lows. Good luck and may all your special events be spectacular!
Ron Miziker is creative director of the Miziker Entertainment Group. This article is an edited extract from Miziker’s Complete Event Planner’s Handbook, just published by the University of New Mexico Press. The comprehensive, 482 page book is available from the IAAPA Bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all leading booksellers. An e-book is available from Amazon, iTunes and Nook.
FEBRUARY 2016
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