Santa’s Grand Arrival is the City of Melbourne’s public event designed to stimulate an early start to the Christmas shopping period for Melbourne’s retailers. It revolves around high-quality entertainment featuring some of the world’s best known licensed characters such as Shrek, Dora the Explorer and the animals of Madagascar.
Showtime Attractions, Australia’s premier provider of licensed characters invited us to partner with them, in order to deliver the event. They were responsible for the onstage content, while we provided the required logistics, risk, technical and project management.
Held in Bourke Street Mall, the heart of Melbourne, the main challenge of the event was to design, construct and manage a temporary venue for 3,000 within a busy public space. We needed to provide the audience with an appealing and immersive experience while maintaining pedestrian flow around the event so that unrelated visitors could still access each of the retailers within the mall.
Using our experience in delivering logistics challenges to the highest public safety standards, we designed and implemented a plan that achieved the objectives, while also finding room for a pram parking area – an element never before achieved due to the extreme lack of space.
The City of Melbourne were extremely pleased with the result: their safest and smoothest Santa’s Grand Arrival in memory.
External Link: Showtime Attractions
