AV Connections was pleased to be the charity event audiovisual sponsor for last night’s Travis Branch Swing for a Cure Tournament Kick Off Party in Mt. Pleasant, SC. The Kick Off party begins the golf tournament weekend for the charity and is a great way to get the players and their families involved and excited. We were pleased to be on hand with an audiovisual system to get the evening rolling.

Swing for a Cure was founded in memory of Travis Branch and Eric Crawford. This charity raises funds for the Comprehensive Sarcoma Program at the Hollings Cancer Center at Medical University of South Carolina, funding the research needed to save lives. The golf tournament and kick off party are yearly events held in Mt. Pleasant, SC. This year, the Saturday golf tournament which follows the kick off event you see here will be played at Patriots Point Links.

Our community is grateful for the ongoing work of charities like these, and especially of MUSC which serves our local community. We were pleased to help with this Kick Off party and we look forward to many happy years of fundraising alongside Swing for a Cure.

Charleston’s 2015 AHA Heart Gala was another incredible showcase for our AV and event lighting in Charleston SC and we were pleased to be presenting sponsors. This year’s gala dinner was held at the Memminger Auditorium in downtown Charleston, SC.

We work at the Memminger Auditorium for conference AV and lighting frequently and we are always pleased to light a happy party there. The auditorium recently had a complete renovation making it a perfect venue for a charity or conference dinner event. For this gala, the room was split into two areas by a floor to ceiling curtain. On one side was the bar and cocktail hour where the silent auction took place. On the other side, the room was set for a gold-touched deco dinner party for 300 people.

Our AV and event lighting in Charleston consisted of the fast fold projection screens you see above both the dining room and cocktail room in the photos. We hung cafe bulb lighting to twinkle above the bar. The dining received the royal treatment with five huge staggered crystal chandelier rentals set of by long strands of cafe bulb lighting across the top of the ballroom. It made for a stunning sight! The guests were thrilled when they stepped into the dining area of the evening.

It is that time of year again and we have once again been honored to have our Charleston gala lighting center front in our presenting sponsorship for the 2015 Chase After a Cure Gala. One of our most exciting events of each year, the Chase After a Cure gala is an opportunity for our various talents and teams at AV Connections to truly show off.

This year the theme of the gala was An Evening in Paris. Beginning months before, we created custom Gobo lighting effects for the interior and exterior of the Memminger Auditorium in downtown Charleston, SC. Each year the Chase gala welcomes four hundred guests and it is the charitiy’s primary fundraising effort of the year. Consequently, we truly need to create a stunning and memorable atmosphere; without fail it has to be a party to remember. We planned for nearly one thousand yards of custom draping for the floor to ceiling effect you see here. Then added uplighting in a palate of carefully selected color tones, some twenty in all. We moved on to create the custom log effects and specialty stage lighting for the evening’s entertainment. After weeks of preparation and custom products being shipped in, it was time.

This year we loaded into the Memminger the day before which was a great change for us. In previous years when the locations were only available day-of, we began the event set up at 4:30 am. In those instances, we are on site from 4:30 am until 2 am the next day. It is just what has to be done and to accomplish the task, we pull in additional crews from our North Carolina AV Connections office.

Joined by a complement of AV Connections lighting and AV techs, as well as our senior management, we created another incredible gala for Chase After A Cure, a charity close to our hearts for personal reasons. We are moved and humbled by their mission and always glad to be a presenting sponsor of this event.

We are constantly honored to be the lighting rental Charleston SC vendor of choice for the historic preservation charities in Charleston, of which there are several. Charleston, SC is a town known for having saved itself from the brink of allowing the city to crumble into the peninsula. In the 1950’s a herculean historic effort commenced here in our fair city to save her historic structures. This effort has been so successful that Charleston, SC has become a model for cities around the world both in fundraising and in supporting schools and institutions which save our buildings.

One of the leading organizations and certainly the oldest is the notable Historic Foundation of Charleston. The Foundation supports seemingly endless and massive projects and undertakings throughout Charleston: Supports multiple historic homes, runs the archives, preservation projects, museums, and the Festival of Homes. Among the supporting donor groups for these efforts is the event you see above, Women of Impact. This is the second annual event of its kind, the first time Charleston SC’s Historic Rice Mill on the Ashley River downtown. AV Connections is a regular provider of AV and lightign rentals at Rice Mill, and we are always game to jump in and help on behalf of a charity.

We provided all of the specialty event lighting rentals you see here, the uplighting effects, and all of the presentation audio visual equipment. It was a successful night for the charity and Rice mill put on a beautiful party as always. Another great evening for Charleston, we were honored to be the lighting rental Charleston SC vendor of choice once again for the Historic Charleston Foundation.

We had a blast as the Charleston audiovisual provider and sponsor of the Autism Speaks Celebrity Auction at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Downtown Charleston, SC.

Autism Speaks, Carolinas Communities, hosted Master Pieces for Autism Charleston, an art auction benefiting Autism Speaks, on March 14th in Charleston, S.C.

The celebrity auction event featured original artwork made from puzzle piece shapes and designed by more than thirty different celebrities, artists, and individuals on the autism spectrum. Celebrity artists included Jeff Bridges, Edwin McCain, Grace Slick, Dabo Swinney, Jesse McCartney, Carolyn Murray, Michael Cartellone, The Ace and TJ show, Bernie Taupin, and more.

As you can see, the auction had a great turnout and surely raised a great deal for Autism Speaks.

We were on site at Embassy Suites Charleston, one of our favorite conference and banquet locations at which we provide Charleston audiovisual rentals and staging. We look forward to many years of partnership with Autism Speaks, Carolina’s Communities, it was a pleasure to serve them.

For this gala banquet evening, AV Connections provided:
LCD Projector
8×8 Screen (w/ Black Bottom Skirt)
4 JBL EON 15 Powered Speakers and stands
Shure UHF Wireless Hand Held Microphone System
1 Yamaha MG10/2 Mixer

Our Charleston gala event lighting, draping, and audiovisual for Chase After A Cure Golden Gala 2014 was unlike anything ever seen in Charleston before! Such an exciting job and evening!

AV Connections of Charleston, SC was pleased to be both a major corporate sponsor and the gala event lighting and audiovisual provider for this annual charity event to cure neuroblastoma, a cancer which affects children. This is a cause which resounds with AV Connections; our owner’s family gratefully has a survivor of this high-mortality cancer. We wanted to go the extra mile for the 6th Annual Chase After a Cure Gala and help the charity continue to pay for treatment and research of neuroblastoma.

Our North Carolina and Charleston gala event lighting groups spent countless hours planning how they would turn the historic Memminger Auditorium (fresh from a complete renovation) in downtown Charleston into a magical crystal-lit ballroom full of color and sparkle. Chase After A Cure also welcomed American Idol finalist, Elise Testone to perform and this added another layer of audiovisual need to the event.

Packed for load-in the night before in the warehouse, the crews and trucks rolled to the Memminger at 6 am on Saturday morning to begin set up for the event. Ten hours later, the event set-up was complete and the crews headed in to change job-site attire into black tie to be event sponsors. Our talented groups can wear many hats in one day.

Ten hours brought a lot of changes to the Memminger as chandelier lighting, hundreds of yards of draping, and four huge fast-fold screen were suspended twenty five feet above the auditorium floor. To give you an idea how massive a gala lighting and decor project this was, here are before and after photos of the auditorium:

Before:

After:

And, of course, the building exterior event lighting:

In person, it was all even more amazing.

AV Connections is proud to be a sponsor of Chase After A Cure and to be Charleston gala event lighting, rentals, and audiovisual supplier of choice for this incredible event and the charity supported by the Gala. We look forward to the seventh annual gala and only continue to hope the work of Chase After A Cure one day ends childhood cancers once and for all. Until then, we are with this group all the way.