My main roles as a Producer is being in control of the budget and making sure that the money is distributed correctly to each department to suit the requirements; Obtaining the rights of the play in which we want to perform; Organising rehearsals and making sure people attend and are on time. We started with funding of £166 from Lincoln School of Performing Arts, with deciding on doing a script based performance we had to look into receiving the rights to the play of ‘The Bogus Woman’. Instead of going through Casarotta, we decided to get in touch with Kay Adshead herself. By doing this and presenting who we are, stating that we are doing this for our university degree we hoped that Kay and her people may have given us the rights for free. But being a professional business United Agents were unable to do this and we had to go through the same process as any other theatre company. This was a shame as it meant a massive £100 would be leaving the budget, but also it meant that we had to understand the process to obtaining the rights. Daniela was a huge help within this development, setting us up a theatre company email address to make us seem more professional and established. Both Daniela and I spoke to Kay’s assistant, Malini Ladd to understand the progression for the rights.
We stumbled across a few problems when obtaining the right, originally Craig Morrow, Artistic Director of Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, was going to be the one to pay for the rights and sign for them and then out of the company budget we would then pay him back. Unfortunately Craig was off work for a few weeks and was unable to view him work emails. Daniela and I decided that we would take the matters into our own hands and get Malini to send us the rights and we would pay for them using the money we had raised from the bake sale. We decided to do this because, even though we had the rights to perform on that day, we wanted it all to be finalised and know for certain that we had the rights. Finally on the 11th of April 2014 both side of the parties had sign the contract and the rights were finally ours to “… produce an amateur production of the Play on 26th May 2014 for 1 performance at The Lincoln Performing Arts Centre…” (United Agents, 2014).
Now that we had an exact figure of how much the rights would cost we could now start to distribute between the different departments – marketing, admin, props and costume. We wanted to have everything as profession as possible so we decided that we needed to create a fund raising event. We acquired a space within the library in which we held a bake sale and raised £182.60. This was a huge help to the company, this helped the dip in budget which the rights made and this also meant that we could have professional flyers and posters printed.
When deciding on which company to go for when printing our posters and flyers, we wanted the cheapest price we could get but with high quality. Daniela and I went away and looked at different quotes, when we came together we compared prices and decided to go with Instant Print, getting 250 leaflets – colour, double sided, on 150gsm paper and 50 posters – colour, one sided, on 150 gsm paper; together this should cost £64 and then extra for delivery meaning that we are staying within our budget. Luckily there was deal on for a limited time so Daniela and I got the leaflets and posters when this deal was on, meaning we could get the same quality leaflet and posters but much cheaper. We got 500 flyers for £26 and 50 posters for £31 – because the prices were so cheap we were able to select the next day delivery option. This meant that we spent £14.99 on delivery but we received them the next day so we could start to distribute them. Even though the delivery was expense we still stayed within our budget given to marketing as the final cost was £71.99.
https://breakingstories.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2014/05/Snapsnot-of-budget.jpg This link will take you to the budget sheet.
Work Cited: Ladd, M. , United Agents (Open communication by letter. 11th April, 2014)