Today we’d like to introduce you to April Luca.
Thanks for sharing your story with us April. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Beginning in New York and now working from LA, I have a creative agency for events with a global clientele.
I started by producing events in fashion and publishing for brands including Nylon, GQ, Project Runway, Betsey Johnson, and W Magazine. I couldn’t have been happier! I had found a career in NYC where culture and creativity were the bricks and mortar of my work. And we were building celebrations that share ideas, foster communities, create new visions, and inspire bold statements.
My passion for hospitality and nightlife lead me to LA to help open some of Hollywood’s iconic nightlife venues and produce show stopping events. I founded Gold Sky Productions and expanded into the entertainment, gaming, and beauty industries with clients ranging from Rolls Royce, Paramount Studios, PopSugar, Activision, and Hulu.
Has it been a smooth road?
I’ve been relentless in building my business and very fortunate to collaborate with some of the most innovative clients. The events themselves require a high degree of execution.
Each event is its own living, breathing organism. With the amount of planning that goes into a single project there are destined to be ups and downs. Shipments of decor stuck at customs, vendors failing to deliver critical elements, trucks loaded with event goods not making to an event…and yet the show, as they say, must always go on! We have one chance to produce the ultimate affair. Our clients are the core of our business and we strive to deliver the best each time. I am blessed to have always had incredible partners and the most talented team that help us deliver events for our clients that exceed what they dare dream.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Gold Sky Productions focuses on creating emotion with our designs, leading our audiences through cascading moments of joy, delight, frisson, and discovery. Our clients are visionary companies and brands, and we focus on producing events where the design is so much more than set dressing and the audience feels something like true immersion.
We are unique in that we are multi-disciplinary, with my team coming from luxury, fashion, art, architecture, nightlife, brand marketing and large-scale festival productions. This wide-lens approach allows us to be nimble, allows us to over-deliver.
I have grown my event business across the US, as well as internationally, and added hospitality consulting services, along with more Virtual Reality/technology to my focus. Recently I have begun to thread IRL events with the virtual in what we are calling “Mixed Reality Experiences”. These projects take what GSP is known for – incredibly designed spaces with curated experiences – and transferring that into electric, virtual worlds.
We are also bridging the challenge of hosting live events, while keeping social distancing, as a production partner for a new initiative called Vertical Events. These “Vertical Events” are a new, one-of-a-kind concept that utilizes the balconies of premium hotels as customized seating vignettes for guests allowing the pools, atriums and other outdoor hotel spaces they overlook to become the stage for truly the most “2020” gatherings from the comfort of guests’ balconies.
Some recent proud moments include:
Vanity Fair ran our design for their Emmy’s Portrait Studio in book. To see our hard work in print—in one of my longtime favorite magazines—was a feeling I can’t describe.
For another event, massive rain and wind bore down on the banks the East River in Brooklyn right before we were to welcome ten thousand guests to an event sponsored by the likes of Coca Cola and Shea Moisture. We had a giant main stage, over 150 vendors, only 12 hours to redevelop and reconfigure the whole event, and I was 8 months pregnant at the time. My team was flawless in their transition and execution of the alternative plan and pulling that off was the sort of trophy you leave up on your mantelpiece.
This past January, we produced Variety Magazine “Variety Studios” and IndieWire’s “IndieWire Studios” at Sundance Film Festival. These two publications brought staggering talent to the sets we designed. Interviewees included Hillary Clinton (“Hillary”), Gloria Steinem (“The Glorias”), Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Siempre, Luis”), Emma Gonzalez (“Us Kids”), Kerry Washington (“The Fight”), St. Vincent (“The Nowhere Inn”), and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell (“Downhill”).
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Los Angeles, outside of Covid-19, is a perfect setting to start a career in the events business. There are so many opportunities in LA to make an impact in people’s lives and the community—from non-profits/fundraisers, to the entertainment industry and fashion and tech, etc. I have run a successful internship program for most of my career here and enjoyed watching our interns find their inspiration and direction.
I also want to talk for a minute about the challenges that are confronting us as individuals and as a society. There is so much work to be done and I think it’s important we don’t silo our business from the wider community. We will have to innovate; we will have to create. Creativity is the connective tissue that holds us all together. For people just starting out, we are asking them to be heroes. But I’ve never been so inspired and so hopeful as I am about this rising generation.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.GoldSkyProductions.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @aprilluca
- Other: @goldskyproductions
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