Welcome to the On Tour Events blog. In this blog we are going to pass you over to Elise from our wedding design team so she can explain how to take your wedding to a whole new level with LED uplighting.

Hey, iam Elise from On Tour Events, i am based at the London office where my main job is working on wedding side of the business. This wedding blog is all about wedding mood uplighting & how uplighters can really help with changing the way your wedding venue feels & looks.

On Tour Events is one of London & Surreys leading Wedding Lighting Hire Companies.

Uplighting is a type of wedding lighting that adds colour to your wedding venue. It's my number one favorite type of wedding lighting, because it makes a huge impact and just really enhances your venue. First things first, what is uplighting or sometimes referred to as ''mood lighting'' or ''wall wash lighting''? Uplighting is a type of wedding lighting that makes your room glow in colour, any colour in fact!. It's really magical and just so amazing, because you see the walls illuminate from floor to ceiling and it really sets the mood for the room.

Next, let's talk about where to set up your uplighters. So there's a lot of different options when it comes to ''the best place'' to put a uplighter but the most popular is doing the entire room, sometimes it's called a room colour wash. It means you're washing all of the walls in the colour of your choice.

You could also use the uplighters to create a focal point or just highlight one specific area or maybe you just want to uplight your sweetheart table or the cake table. Another option is to do accent lighting, ao it's kind of like uplighting the whole wedding venue, but you're just gonna do small touches of lighting here and there & then, a last option is to do a table glow effect where you would wireless LED uplighters underneath tables, thus making them glow!

So the next part of this blog is about how to setup your wireless uplighters. Now, the good news is that setup is super easy especially when On Tour Events is on site & we are dealing with the whole wedding production side of things. You wouldn't believe it, but you can actually setup your own uplighting in a matter of minutes if you wanted, it probably takes about a couple of minutes per uplighter & you can do an entire venue in a half hour.

So for setup, the basic idea is that you just pick your colour, set the light up against the wall, and then aim it so that it tilts up towards the ceiling, we understand that some customers don't want to be worrying about installing thier lighting on their ''big day'' and most customers opt for On Tour Event to deliver, install & collect the wireless uplighters but for those who want to move them around & have a play with different colours & placements the below will guide & help you.

What about the different types of LED uplighting we offer here at On Tour Events?

There's actually more than one type of uplighter, the standard uplighter or wireless uplighters. The standard uplighters have power cords & the wireless LED uplighters have built-in batteries & that's pretty much the main difference. So other than that, they're very, very similar. So if you're looking at the standard wired uplighter, the nice thing is that they're usually the cheapest version of the uplighter we offer at On Tour Events.

The nice thing is that you can actually plug a few together (something called daisy chaining) and you wont need to worry about the batteries running out, as long as the venue power stays on the LED uplighters will continue to work BUT.... cabling can be messy and sometimes (most the time) we would recommend using wireless LED uplighters for a wedding as they last 16+ hours & most weddings parties are finished by then

So wireless uplighting... means you don't need to worry about power & running cable everywhere at all or maybe it's an outdoor wedding where you just don't have outlets, wireless uplighting is a great option. We use the LED Core wireless uplighters which have the built-in batteries, and the batteries last round 12 - 16 hours depending on the colour they are set too & if it's cold outside.

Why does this make a difference? Well if you wanted a plain blue colour less LED's would be used thus the uplighter would stay on longer, if you wanted a bright white colour then all of the RGBWA cells would be used & the batteries would run out quicker. Now the weather plays apart because if its cold batteries fail, if it's 40+ in the summer the batteries would cook... so just bare this in mind when choosing where to place the uplighters.

Now of course the wireless uplighters are fully rechargeable, so if you let's say you're testing out the lights before the wedding, you can plug them back in and charge them up. It's really easy. You just use power cords we supply to plug them in & just like we were talking about with the standard uplights, you can link all of these wireless uplights together with a single outlet & that's gonna charge up all the uplighter at the same time using that one outlet (a maximum of 6 units from one outlet).

When you want to check the battery level on an uplighter, it's super easy. You just look at the back of the light and there is a mini-screen where you can see some bars or dashes, if you see that the screen say ''charged'', this means the uplighter is fully charged & if you don't see this but still plan on using them just remember they will still work but the battery will run out quicker..

What Colours Can The Uplighters Be?

Now, when it comes to colours you can do the sames colours, whether you're doing the standard uplighters or the wireless uplighters the biggest difference is really just how you program the colours, if On Tour Events is on site & we are dealing with your wedding lighting & whole wedding production dont worry about this as we would of spoken to you beforehand about the colours you want but for the purpose of this blog let's say you want to change the colour(s) yourself,

With the standard uplighters, you're going to use a button on the light & that's how you pick your colour. It's gonna be a simple menu with some buttons, and you just hit that up or down allowing you to scrolling through different colour options. When you see the colour that you like just press enter and it locks that colour in place. When you're doing the wireless uplights, the colours actually can be done using a remote control, so the remote has some colour-coded buttons, and you just hit the button for the colour that you want.

Now, when it comes to custom colours, you can get any colour that you want. If you have let's say a really specific shade of teal for your wedding colours, you can match that uplighter to that exact shade of teal. You just hit the button for red, increase or decrease, hit the button for blue and green, same thing & you just keep increasing or decreasing those proportions until you see exactly the colour that you want.

Colours can be as simple as just pushing a button to get the colour that you want or if you feel like getting really creative and a little technical, you can mix your very own custom colour all in a matter of minutes.

Now, for lighting the entire room, that's gonna mean that you are spacing these uplighters all around the room up against the wall. If you want to highlight just one specific area, all you would do in that case is place the lights in that area. So let's say you're doing a backdrop behind the head table. What you can do there, if it's a linen backdrop, you can place the uplighters either in front of or behind the backdrop and angle them so that they kind of catch the linen in that beam of light & you'll see the linen glow in colour.

Now, that third option was to do accent lighting. So in that case, we're not lighting up the whole venue. We're just adding some little touches of colour & that's a really nice way to still dress up your wedding venue, but without going way over the top if you don't have the budget or if you just don't want to go for that look, On Tour Events offers a 3D rendering services which allows us to bring your wedding venue to life before hand & this will allow you to see what the uplighters look like in the venue beforehand.

If you don't want to have lots of uplighters then you could probably just put one uplighter in each corner, or just spread them out so that there's much more distance between each light, & that's what's gonna give you those splashes of colour and add a really nice finishing touch. Remember there is no right or wrong everyone is different & its wat works for you that counts.

The last option is the table glow effect. So this is something a little different and fun that you can do with uplighting & what it does is it makes it look like your table linens are glowing. It looks really cool with cocktail table linens & if your planning a ''party'' party then these really do work well & it looks really nice for the head table as well.

On Tour Events is UK based lighting hire company

What you do is you just take that uplighter and you put it under the table, If you're doing a cocktail table, you probably just need one uplight & if you're doing the head table, you wanna place the uplighter so that you've got maybe two or three total that are spanning across the length of that head table. So those are some different places that you can set up your uplighter for your wedding, hope that helps give you some ideas of what is possible. You can also ask us for our advice !

How to estimate the quantity of uplighter needed for your wedding venue?. The general rule of thumb that you wanna keep in mind is to space your uplights 10 feet apart for a nice overall look, or five feet apart for a dramatic look. So that's the key here & what you want to do is find out the size of your venue. So ask for a floor plan, you should be able to get that & from experience most wedding venues in London, Surrey have floor plans available or we might already have a copy here so just ask, On Tour Events has worked in most if not all the major wedding venues across Surrey & London. So the floor plan is going to make it really easy for you to map out how many uplighter that you need.

Now, if you can't get a copy of the floor plan, don't worry, you could just take a tape measure and go measure those walls yourself then, add up those measurements. That's the total amount of feet that you need to cover then, take that number and either divide by five or by 10, depending on what look you want. So divide your number by five if you want a dramatic look or divide your number by 10 for just a nice overall look. Now, if you hate and math and you just don't want to do this at all, don't worry On Tour Events can deal with all your wedding production requirements & we can tell you how many uplighter are needed

Now, let's talk about how to pick your colour for uplighting. I mentioned that you can set your uplighter to just about any shade of any colour, but a lot of people don't really know where to start with that. I mean, how do you pick which colour to use? So there's a couple of different ways that you can choose your colour. The best place to start is think about your wedding colour pallette. So that's a great way to just tie in your wedding colours and your theme, If you have let's say blue and gold are your wedding colours, you could actually use one of those colours for your uplighting.

The second thing to think about is what type of mood that you wanna create, different colours will kind of invoke a different mood. The vibrant and darker colours are going to be more dramatic looking, It's gonna add energy & the softer, lighter colours are going to give you, um, more of an accent lighting effect, a little bit more elegant and low-key and not as dramatic but this is just my opinion & again everyone is different & has different tastes .

So that's a look at everything you need to know about uplighting for your wedding or event. If you have any questions, definitely get in touch. I would love to help you out, whether you need some advice about what colour to use or how many uplighters to use for your venue. You can always reach me at here on the contact us page & don't forget you can always check out our website if you're looking for uplighting or any other production hire service

Thank you guys so much for reading my blogs & I hope it helps with your big day! & if you want to read or know about our wedding uplighting services please see this uplighting blog here

On Tour Events: Technical Audio Visual Event Services London
OFFICE & WAREHOUSE:
+PHONE: 020 8058 0093
+MONDAY - FRIDAY 08:00 - 20:00 
+POST: Office 108 Belgrove House Belgrove Street, London, WC1H8AA
+FACEBOOK.COM/EVENTPRODUCTIONHIRE
+TWITTER.COM/ONTOUREVENTS
+INSTAGRAM.COM/ONTOUREVENTS
+Google My Busniuess Page & Reviews https://www.google.com/maps?cid=11919891004926379003