Exploring Life & Business with Gina Lee of Astrum Productions

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gina Lee.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
The biggest passion of mine since growing up is sharing that excitement of something you love with someone else. This took many forms over the years, from creating fan content through art, writing, videos, online and in person events.

Events, in particular, became a special focus because it was especially incredible to see people’s live reactions to experiences I create.

When I was in college, I started playing a game with my friends called “League of Legends”. This was when the game was just starting to get popular. Through chatting and meeting up in person, I noticed there was such a huge demand from fans for events, but not a lot of official events available. I started creating fan events to fill this gap, and met so many wonderful friends because of it.

After running the first few events, I started to hear stories of how attendees found it to be such a memorable time for them, and how they met new friends through a shared space and passion. This inspired me to keep creating more, as well as attending nearly every event I could to learn and improve on what makes an event great and what really dampens the attendee experience.

I’ve organized everything from 2,000 attendee watch parties, livestreamed charity events that brought in over 4000 concurrent viewers and thousands in donations, highly immersive sold out cosplay cafe experiences, tailgate parties, themed parties, private parties, employee and client summits, internal conferences, to meet and greets for top influencers in gaming.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It hasn’t always been smooth, but meeting the incredible people I know now, who are key pillars in making all my events come together, was entirely worth it.

At one point, people tried to steal our work by registering for copyrights before we could, or trying to intimidate us into signing away our IPs and ideas. A lot of hard lessons were learned during that time, but they failed to take away our passion or our success. I’m happy to say that every event we’ve done has been unique in some way, and really works to bring the fan experience to life in creative ways.

We constantly uplevel our attendee experience so that they believe in our vision whenever we want to try something new.

We’ve been impressed with Astrum Productions, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
After close to 10 years of producing and organizing fan events as a side hobby, I finally decided to take the plunge and set up a formal company to legitimize my event work.

I specialize in making engaging and highly immersive experiences for superfans, creating innovative activities and campaigns to celebrate and experience fandom in an in-person and memorable way.

I want attendees to walk away from my events feeling like a part of what they love has come to life in a way they’ve never envisioned before. A lot of my passions revolve around storytelling in books, video games, movie franchises, etc and the wish of “if only this was real!” often took up my waking thoughts. I can’t make fantasy come to life, but I can get as close to it as I can!

My services are extremely exclusive and limited. I only design high touch events for moments or themes that I am personally passionate about. This ensures I have in depth knowledge of the IP/fandom and its community to bring a tentpole moment to life and have people talk about it forever.

More importantly, I believe events are a key part of community building. People like to throw this term around like a buzzword, but making an event is more than just throwing a bunch of people together in the same time and space. To truly make it about community engagement, there needs to be opportunities designed for people to meet and bond over a shared experience. It has to feel natural and not forced. It has to spark passion in them and make them want to participate, not for any promised reward but for the experience itself.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I’m not a risk taker financially. I typically control my events to fit the set budget well.

I would say the biggest risks I take are with my ideas. The events I create typically involve ideas that either no one has ever done before, or hasn’t been able to be achieved at scale in a practical and impactful way. Being able to have full creative control on both the ideation and the execution of my events have been both dangerous (because I can get carried away) and exhilarating (when I manage to actually pull it off).

I think risk is always necessary when starting a business, or when doing something new.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.deepspacegala.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astrumproductions
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gichilee/

Image Credits
Kiera films