LO2 - planning our festival

Today we started to plan our festival by deciding on the venue, the date, and who will talk to miss. Harris about our proposal as well as some information about our festival. We decided our venue would be in the hall, the street and outside but if it rained we would move it indoors to either the street or the sports hall and the date is 2ed July which is flexible Friday. The name of our festival is "The Summer Arts Festival" and the theme we use will be performing arts including films, music, drama and an assortment of other things. We have decided that our festival will start at lunch and finish after school. This means that we have to talk to Mrs peace who is the business manager for our school and Mr Mosscrop who manages the timetables at the school. to see if we can book the school for an after school event. We will use the screens in the street to show a PowerPoint presentation and if we can get some sponsors so we can increase our budget then we will mention the sponsor in the PowerPoint and any other form of advertising that we do. We also talked about the different job roles that we could do in the planning or performing of our festival. Some of the jobs that we came up with were creative director, advertising, security, and technical work ect.

LO2- Interview with Steve Causer

Before we asked him our questions he gave us a presentation about what he does, about festival and how we could make ours better. Some of the festivals he did are:

Swindon invincible
Swindon shuffle 2009
Big arts day
Radio 1 big weekend
John peel day
Phantasmagoria film festival

He told us the main ways that festival was from tickets, sponsorship, bar, food, pitches and advertising - banners ect and the main costs are: infrastructure, marketing, artists, technical, bar/drinks costs and the after party. He also told us that in our team we would need a creative director, marketing - web, logistics, crew - artist liaison/technical ect, stewards and security.

He said some important things that we had to know are our venue, dates, acts, marketing, tickets, licences, what we can and cannot do with our venue, policing and security, ticket selling, on-site facilities and act requirements.

When we asked him questions we asked him about some problems he found, what his worst festival was, if its is better to have a festival indoors or outdoors ect. He said that we need to be ready in case of change of dates, drug issues and we need to show people that we are aware of any problems that could happen, we should not bring people in at the last minuet, if you sell tickets online you don't get the money until after the event, its better to have your own security, running festivals is very expensive, if the police come you have to pay them, be clear about what your festival is and what will be there and it takes about a year to organize.

He also told us that if we are going to sell tickets and we want the money we make on the tickets to be used to fund the event then we should only sell tickets in person because if you use the internet you don't get the money until after the festival so if you wanted to used the ticket money to pay for acts you could not so it is better to sell tickets in person. The only bad bit about this is that you might not sell as many tickets as you would have if you had sold tickets online as well as in person.

The last thing he told us was about when the festival is running he said: if the police come to the festival you pay for their attendance, first aid on-site, how we could get everybody in and out and what to do in case there is a fire or any other emergency e.g. where are the fire extinguishers ect.

LO2. planning

All of these posters are posters that we made during the plannig process of our festival.

Today we planned questions for our talk with Steve causer. These are the questions we thought of:

What type of festivals do you organize?
Where are some good venues?
Inside\Outside?
What influences you to organise a festival?
What involvement did you have at the big weekend?
How do you generate funding?
How long does it take to organize?
How long do you prepare?
How do you pick the themes and contents?
How long does it take to set up?
What festival have you liked the most?
What are the health and safety procedures?
Can you think of an event that has had problems and how did you avoid them?