Professional Practice for Events

Weeks 8 and 9 The food hygiene course is important for understanding the essential measures to put in place in order to avoid contamination. We learnt about storage in the kitchen and how everything should be stored. For example, fish and raw meats should be kept at the bottom shelf always to avoid any liquids dropping down onto anything which may cause contamination. Furthermore, the temperature control of food is essential in ensuring the food is safe to serve to guests to eat. The temperature danger zone is between 8-60 degrees. When defrosting, chilling, reheating, cooking or storing food it must be done properly to minimise the growth of bacteria, reducing the chances of becoming ill from food poisoning.  When deciding on the menu and catering style for our event, it had to match the colour theme (navy, gold, white) and all menus we wanted to have the same font so people recognised our event. We decided to create two menus, one for canapes and one for drinks. The canapes we ar...

 Weeks 4 and 7  Sound is important within events as it sets the atmosphere and mood as guests enter the event space. Sound is vibrations which produce pressure changes in the air, creating a wave effect of high and low pressure (sound wave). In event spaces, sound causes echoes, reflections, absorption, diffraction and refraction all caused by waves. There are 5 basic components to sound which are known as SMASH (Source, mixer, amplifier, speakers, happy days). The basic sound chain consists of a microphone, CD player, amplifier, speaker and a mixing desk, which connects most of these components through the line level. We learnt how to connect these components to each other using inputs. Furthermore, we looked at the basic functions of  a DJ mixer. For our event, we have hired a DJ who will be bringing her own mixing desk and macbook to play music from so therefore the only sound equipment required will be speakers.  It is important to prevent safety hazards at any e...

Week 5  In this weeks workshop, we learnt how to use SketchUp. Our task was to make the walls and infrastructure of the Hospitality Suite. I used the toolbox and discovered useful tools such as the push/pull, shift and move icons to make the Suite look as realistic as possible. I adjusted the dimensions of the walls by typing in the numbers e.g., 3x3cm in the bottom right hand corner of the page. Furthermore, I used 3D warehouse to input the glass windows and furniture. This SketchUp demonstration I found useful as we had to use a map layout of the management building so physically building the Suite itself helped me envision the layout of where we can put everything on the day of our event.  This week, we learnt how to set up lighting systems safely. I learnt that there are many different types of lights including flood, birdies, parcan, fresnel, pebble convex and profiles. I think we will use more fresnel lights for our event rather than flood lights as fresnel lights have m...

Week 3 This week, I have contributed towards producing a competitive analysis for each item in both my groups, catering and event design. For catering, I researched the price of beers and soft drinks online at Supermarkets such as Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys. We found Budweiser the cheapest and most popular choice out of all beers (12pk for £8.99) in multiple supermarkets, so have decided to just serve this instead of adding Corona another popular choice (12pk for £11.00) on top of our budget. I also visited Lidl to take pictures of some ingredients used to make the canapes as these could not be found online. For event design, I researched the price of gold ribbon, a red carpet and a helium cannister on websites such as Amazon and Etsy. The helium cannister was taking up a large proportion of our budget (£32.50 from Amazon) so we tested sticking a balloon to the ceiling with a sticky dot and leaving it there overnight to see if it would stay and it did so we will now use sticky dots (3000p...

Week 2 This week we looked at aspects to consider when hosting an event. We looked at EMBOK design elements which included content, theme, programme, environment, production, entertainment and catering. Next, we divided ourselves up into groups based upon these design elements in order for us to focus our attention to specific parts of the organisation towards our event. I felt I could contribute most to the catering and event design team due to my previous and current career and creative imagination for new ideas. Symbolic interactionism was highlighted, reiterating the point that words are symbolic, meaning the name of our event needs to specify to the audience what the type of event is e.g., 'Cardiffmet Grad-ball'. We have also created a social media account on Instagram and TikTok to prepare to share posts and sneak peaks of our planning behind the scenes.  Collectively, we decided to change the colour theme of our event to navy, white and gold instead of black, red and gol...

                                                                                 Week 1   Before being assigned to our groups, we completed a Belbin test to find out how we can best contribute to a team project. It helped us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. The two groups were allocated based on our results from the Belbin test which indicated our roles as individuals e.g., I am a team worker. This means, all individuals will have complementary strengths in a team. Our first exercise as a team was to build the highest tower using just spaghetti and marshmallows in a race against the other group. Our group won highest structure, proving we worked efficiently as a team and communicated well.   Our event objective is to throw a graduation ball for all THE students ...