Event profile: Love is Blind

August 16, 2023

Photo courtesy of CORT Party Rental

Event:

The Netflix series “Love is Blind,” which premiered in 2020 and is set to launch its sixth season in March 2024, features single men and women looking for love and getting engaged — all before meeting their partners.

The drama of each of the series’ seasons culminates in a wedding for the surviving couples, and the rental partner of choice for season four was CORT Party Rental, Everett, Wash.

Challenges:

“From the beginning I could tell that this event was different than ones [we have catered to] in the past,” says Felix Felipa, event project manager, CORT Party Rental. “The client needed a tent, flooring and different accessories to make it a perfect wedding venue, and they asked for five different orders to be delivered at very specific windows.”

What made multiple deliveries like these extra challenging was the fact that the filming location at North Fork Farms in Snoqualmie, Wash., was 1.5 hours from CORT’s warehouse. “This alone presented an obstacle due to the location of the events,” Felipa says.

The location’s dual-purpose TV production/wedding venue environment also presented staging difficulties. Felipa says getting the tent and flooring in “would prove to be difficult as we had limited time and access due to the layout of the venue and the production setup for the show.”

On top of all this, there was foul weather to contend with. “We had to deal with sporadic rain and windstorms,” Felipa says. “We had a big windstorm the night before the first wedding. The wind was pushing up on the tent and we were seeing some of the stakes starting to fail.”

Solutions:

CORT Party Rentals’ team put in the long hours needed to schedule deliveries and erect the tent, flooring and accessories according to the needs of the production schedule. “We spent three days of about 16-plus hours on site for the main install,” Felipa says.

Then, on-site flexibility was brought to bear when standard wedding setups simply wouldn’t work due to the shoot’s riggings for line-of-sight camera work, lighting and sound.

“[The producers] needed to take shots of the venue periodically throughout the install and they would want nothing on site except for some of the equipment we were using, so our trucks and our people had to be gone,” Felipa says. “We would plan accordingly and take lunch breaks or go grab food at those times and then come back. A lot of it was just our crew being willing to work longer hours.”

He adds that the windstorms CORT’s crew was confronted with “made us pivot and remove all the clear walls we had initially on the tent. Taking the walls off allowed the wind to go straight through the tent and it was a lot better.”

“In the end our crews did a great job adjusting, and our equipment looked exceptional on screen,” Felipa says. “Having the opportunity to work on this was a great experience and really shows how our team was able to accomplish something great for all to see.”

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