We really love New Year’s Eve… it’s the ultimate celebration. The culmination of everything you’ve been fortunate enough to experience over the past year, and if you weren’t so fortunate, the chance to start over and have a clean slate for the year ahead. It’s absolutely magical, the the celebrations and parties that we throw for them are simply the definition of exciting.
Living so close to New York, we’ve always watched the Times Square ball drop. The Times Square Alliance has done a fantastic job and continues to outdo itself every year! It’s the biggest party on earth, with over one million in attendance each and every year, complete with star-studded performances and tons of confetti. We’ve even braved the cold and attended it ourselves a few times! But the magic of the ball drop always seemed so important; it is after all the crowning moment of coronating a new year. One year, we set out to make a ball drop of our own…
We used over 150 clear plastic SOLO cups, and stapled them together to form a sphere. (There are several online guides for doing this.) We’re professionals in lighting, so we outfitted it with our smallest fixtures and programmed a beautiful custom light show for every phase of the evening and the drop itself. Once the clock hit 11:59:00 PM, our ball began its manually-operated rope tethered descent down a flagpole we set up and the rest is history. Not bad for a hobbyist’s attempt.
But this model presents problems. The cups are exceedingly brittle in the cold, and whether you use staples and they tear out from the weight of the ball, or you used glue and the adhesion fails from the cold, it’s not reliable. The other issue with the cups is that due to their namesake shape, they’re very good at catching wind. Any wind at all is more than enough to shred your ball apart while it’s at full mast. And lastly, it simply looks cheap up-close. Festive, but not awe inspiring in the slightest. So we set out to design something that observes and celebrates all the pomp and circumstance of it’s older cousin in New York.
We’re proud to begin offering a NYE Ball Drop to the state of services we provide. We’ve designed a ball blueprint that we’re able to scale up or down in size, made from the most durable inner-structure, and ornamented by frosted glass panels, for all-weather performance and crystalline beauty. We then went ahead and constructed TWO balls from this blueprint: one is a two-frequency geodesic sphere measuring three feet in diameter, and the other is a three-frequency geodesic sphere measuring six feet in diameter (identical and exact in size to the Fifth (used in 2008) Times Square ball, now currently on display in the Times Square Visitor Center). The smaller ball will be used for residential events and private parties, while the larger ball will be reserved for municipal-size events. We plan on constructing additional balls and setups when and if demand should call for them.
