The centerpiece of Everett's World Cup Waterfront Watch Party? A stack of LED panels that had just come off a truck, sitting in wheeled crates behind The Muse Whiskey & Coffee. Around them stood the crew from Audio Engineers NW - the production company the city brought in to build the venue - and the job in front of them was to turn that stack into a screen thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, bright enough to watch in direct sun, in time for ten thousand people to show up at Boxcar Park.
"We have gear coming in from Florida, Vegas, Miami, LA." - Paul Hinderlie
Everett Community spent a day on-site during the build, with special access to photograph the work and talk to the crew. What the finished stage hides, it turns out, is almost everything: months of planning, precision engineering, and the hours of physical labor that a clean final product makes invisible to the audience. Crowds never see the challenges of a build like this, with equipment shipped in from across the country.
"There's a lot to this," said Garrett Doran, AENW's Director of Operations and the project manager on the job. "Rigging, load calculations, structural design, miles of cable, working with heavy equipment. For this show we also have three generators and a telehandler. All of those details are things we start working on months ahead of time."
Meet The Crew: Garrett Doran, Hunter Shaw, Kyle Shaw-Reil, Ryan Evans, Matthew Morin, Isaac McCormick, William "Billy" Stevenson, Wilson Foss, Wyatt Harbaugh, Eric Varndell, Topher Fultz, Frank Beals, Paul Hinderlie, Jesse Maize, and Hayden Jennings.
The video wall was both the centerpiece and the constraint. "This is a special outdoor-rated, super-bright LED screen," said Isaac McCormick, who worked the build. "We've been talking about it for months, so we were excited to get it in the shop, get our hands on it." The catch was that it had arrived only about a week before load-in, which left little room in an already tight schedule.
"I'll never ask a crew member to do something I wouldn't do myself." - Garrett Doran
"When all the panels are connected, it's going to be about thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall," said Topher Fultz, who specializes in video displays. "It's taking more time than expected to build, because we just got it." Fultz has done this work since he was in high school, twenty-seven years now, and described the draw of it with a smile. "A lot of us do this because we like to see the looks on people's faces when it's done. I get paid to make people happy, pretty much."
If the work was serious, the mood on-site didn't show it. The crew moved with the easy back-and-forth of people who have done a lot of jobs together - steady ribbing, a running stream of jokes, laughter between cable pulls. The camaraderie wasn't a distraction from the work so much as the thing that got them through a long day of it. For Hinderlie, the payoff is the moment it all switches on.
"I'm excited to get the screen powered up, excited to see people here appreciating the effort and work that goes in." - Paul Hinderlie
The audio is built to match the screen. By Doran's account, the system is designed for more than ten thousand people, with clear sound for anyone standing as far as 360 feet from the stage, paired with a video wall bright enough to hold up in full daylight.
For Doran, a job this size also doubles as a classroom. "Because this job is different from most, it offers a lot of training opportunities: power distribution, heavy equipment, generators, climbing," he said. He has a specific idea of what running a crew should look like. "Being a leader means being at the front of the charge."
He also wanted credit kept where it belonged, with the design work performed by AENW. "These are all our designs that we came up with, the layout, the architecture, all based on the city telling us what they wanted to happen."
The part the crowd will never see is the sheer volume of labor. Across the pre-build, four show days, and two full teardowns, the AENW call sheet accounts for more than 415 crew-hours from fifteen people: early-morning truck loads, midnight strikes, and long stretches of rigging and cable in between.
The watch parties at Boxcar Park are available in our community calendar, and span across four sessions: June 11 (10a-5p and 4pā9p), June 18 (4pā9p), and June 19 (10a-5p). Admission is free.