Huntly events company Standing Ovation entertain town during quarantine
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A UNIQUE plan from a Huntly events company helped cure the town's quarantine boredom last Friday night.
The organisation Standing Ovation set up a drive-in movie theatre in the Cooper Park car park, with just shy of 100 viewers watching Toy Story from the comfort and safety of their car.
With the events industry struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, Standing Ovation owner Brodie Murray and his team, Stuart Jack, from Kintore, and Callum Duff and Fergus Sharp of Huntly, used their initiative and came up with a plan to keep families entertained, without breaking quarantine rules.
Mr Murray said: "With people being in quarantine, the events industry has taken a big hit.
"The company has lost a lot of bookings and money for the future. Our whole year has been postponed, cancelled and moved about because of the coronavirus.
"We were thinking outside the box and came up with this crafty way of keeping everybody entertained, while maintaining social distancing.
"It was a really, really good night. The turnout was great and people were really happy, so we have no complaints at all.
"We had about 20 cars – five more and the car park would have been full – and most were families of four."
The plan was originally for this event to become something more regular but, with the strict stay-at-home measures implemented by both the Scottish and UK governments on Monday evening, that is now no longer possible.
Mr Murray added: "We would get a fairly hefty fine if we did put on the event again.
"Even just setting it up – I can't do that alone and there would be too many people needed.
"It's definitely something we will look at in the future. We were looking at different places, logistics and costs already.
"The interest after the event was huge, too, with people saying they couldn't make it but would go next time. It was short notice as we organised it on the Wednesday and it was on the Friday."
The group had a bucket collection set up at the entrance to the car park, which was due to go towards future showings.
However, in light of the stricter measures which have since been imposed, Mr Murray said the group will be donating the £117.65 cash to a local charity – potentially after having doubled that amount with another drive-in night at some point in the future.
