Corporate AV Production in Atlanta: How K2 Powers Hawthorne’s Annual Conference

When 450 people pour into a conference hotel in Atlanta for three days, you know within the first hour it’s going to be a full-speed few days. Regional managers scatter across the lobby. Someone’s already started the trash talk about the upcoming dance competition. The energy is immediate.

What nobody in that lobby notices — what they’re not supposed to notice — is that K2 Productions has already been in the building for two days.

K2 Productions provided full audiovisual production for Hawthorne’s 2026 Leadership Conference in Atlanta — all rooms and sessions across three days for 450+ attendees. K2 has been Hawthorne’s production partner for nearly 20 years, traveling with them to annual conferences across the Southeast. Before the first regional manager walked through the door, K2 had already built the room.

Before the First Session, the Room Has to Work

Full conference AV production for an event this size doesn’t start at load-in. It starts months earlier, in pre-production, when Jennifer Eller, K2’s Senior Producer and Co-Owner, works through the event’s structure with Hawthorne’s planning team — room by room, session by session.

By the time the crew arrives in Atlanta, every room has a coverage plan. Every session has a technical brief. Every transition on the run of show has been mapped against the AV requirements that make it possible. The general session stage, the breakout rooms, and the award ceremony lighting — none of it is figured out on the day. Jen’s pre-production work means the crew walks in knowing the answers before the questions get asked.

That’s the foundation of invisible AV. Not the equipment — the preparation that makes the equipment irrelevant to the people in the room. When a speaker steps to the podium and their voice carries cleanly through a 450-person ballroom, nobody thinks about the microphone. When the presentation visuals are sharp enough to read from the back row, nobody thinks about the screens. The audience just experiences a conference that holds together, from the opening remarks through the last session of the day.

That invisibility is the goal.

Knowing Where the Story Is Going Before It Gets There

When the general session ends, and 450 people move toward breakouts, you don’t chase them. You’re already positioned — in the corner of the room where two colleagues who haven’t seen each other since last year just made eye contact across the floor.

That’s editorial instinct. It’s also AV instinct. A production team that has spent nearly two decades inside Hawthorne’s conference culture understands what each room needs technically and what each moment means to the people in it. The coverage decisions — where to be, what to capture, what to leave alone — come from knowing the event, not from reading a brief on load-in morning.

With Hawthorne, K2 has nearly 20 years of that knowledge. The shorthand it creates is worth its weight when the conference moves fast. Which this one does.

The Dance Competition Is Not a Footnote

A less-engaged production team would treat the regional manager dance competition as a footnote — fun for the attendees, hard to capture cleanly, easier to focus on the main stage.

K2 treats it as a centerpiece. Because for Hawthorne, it is.

The competition between regional teams isn’t just entertainment. It’s the most visible expression of what the conference is built around: teams that trust each other enough to look ridiculous in front of 450 colleagues. And for that moment to land — on the floor and on camera — the AV environment has to be right. The sound system that carried the keynote has to carry the music. The stage lighting that frames the award presentations has to frame the performance. The room K2 built for the official sessions is the same room that makes the competition possible.

K2 then captures it. Multiple angles, operators who know the reaction shots in the crowd matter as much as the performance on the floor, and an editor who can assemble a sequence that gives you both the spectacle and the heart of it. The K2 Collective — K2’s extended production crew — brings that coverage to every high-energy moment in the conference, not just the ones on the formal run of show.

The Full Conference Picture

Over three days in Atlanta, K2 Productions managed full AV production and event video capture across the entire Hawthorne 2026 Leadership Conference:

• General sessions — full AV production for keynotes, leadership presentations, and company-wide announcements delivered to 450+ attendees
• Award ceremonies — lighting, sound, and video capture for individual recognition moments that carry real weight
• Team-building events and competitions — AV environment design and full camera coverage
• Breakout sessions — room-by-room AV support across all concurrent sessions
• Candid coverage — the conversations, the reunions, the energy between sessions that make a conference worth attending

One team. One brief. No coordination overhead between an AV vendor and a video vendor, trying to work around each other on the same floor.

Why the Community Element Is Worth Capturing

Conference videos are often evaluated by how well they document the official content. Speakers. Presentations. Q&As. That documentation has value — but it’s not what makes a conference video worth watching again.

What makes it worth watching is the evidence of community. The moment the award winner breaks into a genuine smile. The team huddles before the competition. The standing ovation that started before anyone planned for it. For a company like Hawthorne, whose conference is explicitly built around personal connection, those moments are the whole point.

80% of K2 clients come back. The industry average is 50–55%. Part of what that number reflects is that K2 treats every client’s event the way that client treats it — with the same investment in what actually makes it meaningful.

“I have found them to be extremely helpful, extremely collaborative. They’ll do anything for us to give our audience what they need to have the best experience possible.”

— Zack Baranick, Senior VP of Learning and Development, Hawthorne

Planning a Corporate Conference in Atlanta?

Whether your event is built around keynotes and breakouts, team competition, or all of the above, the AV and production team you bring in shapes what the room feels like and what gets remembered.

K2 Productions handles full audiovisual production and event video for corporate conferences across Atlanta and the Southeast — from load-in through final delivery. Hawthorne has trusted K2 with their annual conference for nearly 20 years. They’ve never had to look further.

If you’re planning a multi-day conference and need one team to manage the whole room, reach out to start the conversation.