Located within Disney Studios in Sydney’s Moore Park is a dream factory. No, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is RIZER, a local business charged with bringing to life large-scale marketing and promotional events.
In recent years you may have had the experience of attending an event staged by RIZER – it celebrated the Qantas 100 with an event inside an airline hanger where Kylie Minogue took to the stage to sing ‘I Still Call Australia Home,’ it opened and closed the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 Australia and New Zealand, and in recent months you may have attended it’s eye-popping HBO Max Australian launch event at Sydney’s State Theatre. Recently RIZER signed a contract to create global moments for the Queens Wharf complex in Brisbane (pictured above).
Last month the company lit up Cockatoo Island with a five metre-tall raven-shaped pyre set on fire as the centrepiece of the Wednesday Island event it designed for global streamer Netflix to promote the series return of hit show Wednesday.
It was an incredible showcase to demonstrate what this company was capable of.
Rizer’s Founding Director Barry Wafer told Mediaweek that the event set a new standard for what is possible in regards to launch events like this. But to stage an inspired event, it all comes down to the brief: “We believe in the tighter the brief, the more we get to dream.
“We believe in parameters. We need parameters. Budget is actually crucial and guidelines… we need to be given parameters. Sometimes if it’s too open, you need something to hang your hat on… need something to lean into. So it’s really important to know certain KPIs or certain goals or outcomes that a client needs.”
Barry Wafer
Rizer was one of around five agencies bidding on the opportunity to manage the event. The company was told by Netflix that the destination would be in Sydney and that it’d be an event that would serve as the last stop on a world tour with talent from Wednesday. Beyond that, the business was told to dream big.
“When we heard the brief originally, it was immediate: We wanted to create Wednesday Island because Cockatoo Island has been used a few times over the years… it’s been used for the Biennale and different things, but it hasn’t been used for a hard hitting brand moment. So we were excited about that opportunity and… just even the history of that place. There was a girls’ school that had… some bad… there’s some ghosts that are still around from that time,” Wafer said.
In terms of how long it took Wafer and the team to stage Wednesday Island, a project of that size typically takes them between six and nine months.
“You would have seen there was some large production elements like the pyre, which is the burden of scale.
“There was major set pieces and things.They don’t happen quickly. And it’s not just about how we build them or design them, but also about the compliance around doing things like that: the amount of flame and fire we had throughout that. And then securing a venue… doing detailed feasibilities on it,” Wafer said.
The approach to the work done by Wafer and his team, which includes around 40 staffers working across offices in Sydney, Brisbane and Singapore, has changed as their skills have developed alongside a radically changed media environment where events live on through social media channels.
“Typically for twenty years we’ve been working with on red carpets and premieres, and it’s really very much about the red carpet, the talent. But what we have started to have increasingly more need to in the last few years is bringing the producers and the art departments directly out of the film studios to help us realise our events,” Wafer explained.
“We partnered with Special PR and we did that launch of The Last of Us for HBO Max. For us, it’s all about using easter eggs from whatever series, whatever film, I’m actually working on another one at the moment as well, easter eggs and little tricks and little things that only the fans or people really into it will get, and to pop them into the experience and then see them realising it’s pretty special.
“I think you would have seen [for the Wednesday Island event] we had about 100 or 120 characters in total of talent on the island. Each one of those was given a very specific character to live within for the time on the island, and it was beautiful. It was really beautiful to see their interaction with the guests. I think everyone had an experience with one or two of them,” he said.
A thrill for Wafer was hearing directly from the creators of Wednesday, Al Gough and Miles Miller, about how impressed they were.
“The creators of Wednesday actually came on location earlier than their call time, specifically because they were enthralled by the creativity. They spent over two hours walking through every component. And at the end, we had a catch up and they said it was the first time they’d ever felt that they had actually stepped inside their show,” Wafer said.
“It was a very special feeling for us as a team to hear that. What we always try and do is transport people for a moment. We’re storytellers, right? That’s what we do.”