Mother Producer

Beth Sutch

 

Upon reflecting on my role as Producer it has been a great experience, something that I have really enjoyed. I thrive in organising anything, so within this process Windows Excel has been my very best friend and I have introduced other members of the company to this amazing device.

When first becoming the Producer of Breaking Stories I thought that my only responsibility would be to look after money and to create a budget. But there is more; scheduling rehearsals, obtaining rights and making sure the budget is kept to the right amount within each department.  Aside from this I have enjoyed in being involved in much more than this … I’ve loved being able to drift in and out of each department within the company to see where everyone is up to and that deadlines were being made. This was very helpful as I had a clear idea of the whole company and what was being done. Useful in many ways in case somebody was unable to make a rehearsal – I would be able to step in and continue their role for that rehearsal. Also making deadlines meant that people had a time scale to keep so that each job was being done sooner rather than later. This may have been annoying for the girls as I was forever getting involved and asking ‘What is going on?’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘How is that going to work?’ but helped me understand each department more clearly. Especially with the technical side of things as I was not in the know with terminology and such but now have a basic understanding for lights and sound. I may have been too nosey within other people’s job but I have relished in learning about all the different roles and what is entitled.

As well as being, sometimes, very bossy and nosey I have also felt like the ‘Mother’ of the group. If anyone has had any problems it was made aware at the beginning to come to me so that we could sort it out together; this meant within or without the group. As a company we have grown very close and I am glad the girls were able to come to me in confidence with any problems. Many called me the ‘Mummy’ of the group as I kept them in line but also wanted to make the experience enjoyable. Balancing being professional but also having fun can be a challenge within its self which I believe I have learnt throughout being the company. Learning when to have a joke and a laugh but then also knowing when to pull everybody back in and getting back to work.

I did a few different activities with the girls to keep it exciting, such as when we did the bake sale none of the girls were allowed to count the money and they all had to guess how much money we had raised and the winner received a prize. We had spare posters, which I wrote a members name on each poster and when the girls had time we wrote little messages to each other as a keepsake from our performance. I also organised awards, which each person received one, and the company voted for who they wanted to win. It was a great way to end such an amazing experience.

Post-show Blues

Jessica McDonald

Personally I think the final performance was a success. I feel that I and Charlie operated the lighting, sound and projections in a steady pace. After the dress run, I found that I was a little too hasty with some of the lighting cues, causing the actors to be in light on stage when they were still getting into positions. To solve this I waited for a couple more seconds or I would look to see if the actors that were helping with getting set on and off were back in the wings and gave me the thumbs up.

After the dress run I feel that the actors seemed a little more relaxed with regards to the scene changes. Once we had completed the dress run, the actors then did a quick scene to scene taking pieces of furniture on and off. I think that they became a lot more familiar with the order of the scenes and what items needed to be taken on and when. To help I stuck on the walls off stage, scene orders and what needed to go on and off on what side. By doing this I think it gave the actors that little reassurance that they needed while being back stage and left to their own devices during the show.

When the performance was finished a couple of member of the company went out to the audience to fundraise for Amnesty international. While this was undergo quite a few members of the audience asked questions and spoke the team within the company. Asking question about our inspiration and talking about their opinions. I personally asked my housemates that came to watch the show, what they thought of it. I asked questions like, ‘Do you think the characters within the play were represented well?’ and ‘Could you follow the events in the play easily?’ The feedback was actually very positive, with them explaining the story to myself and explaining the characters and their roles within the piece.

A week after our performance the group had a post-show discussion called a viva voce. Here we had chance to talk about our influences, lighting choice and acting style. For this the group meet the night before in the university library and discussed who contributed what to the production. We talked about Amnesty and why we wanted to include them in our process.

We went back over the roots of our ideas back to January, when we were throwing around ideas and interests of each group member. Again we went back to basics and stripped the production down to all it elements, confirming who contributed what to the process. As a group we help others to talk about what they did, if someone was struggling to explain and idea or aspect, someone else would jump in and help the viva flow.

Over all, I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience, working with this group and seeing our ideas come to life on the stage. I think if we were to carry on with Breaking Stories Theatre Company, we could successfully tour The Bogus Woman. Moving forward, I think that we could have created new productions, scripted and devised, keeping in tone with current issues in the news and maybe issues that are not in the light of the media, giving them a chance to be understood.

Scheduling Rehearsals …

Beth Sutch

 

Organising is something that I really enjoy, so making a rehearsal schedule for the group was fun for me. I collected together all company members timetable for University and any other times that they are not able to do, such as if they are in a society or work at certain times. By doing this I was able to maximise rehearsals by making sure that every member was able to attend. By looking at times and dates that people were not free I was able to draft up available days for rehearsing. Then I searched room bookings and booked the rooms that were free during the times we needed. Unfortunately we were not able to get as much time in the studios within the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre as we would have liked, but we was able to use other rooms within the University. Once rooms were booked I met with the Director, Lauren, to plan out what each rehearsal could consist of. This was to add structure to rehearsals so everybody knew what would be happening within the rehearsals.

Once this was all decided I went away and crafted a rehearsal schedule that was given to each person within the group. Using Windows Excel meant that I could use the columns to organise each rehearsal clearly, splitting it up into; date, time, room, scene and notes – so that notes could be made on each rehearsals to help people, actors especially, to see what they have done on what day and help with their blogs.

https://breakingstories.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/rehearsal-schedule/ This link will take you to the rehearsal schedule.

Money, Money, Money…

Beth Sutch

 

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)

Facebook

Beth Sutch

Starting up a Facebook page is useful for any business, especially for the ones who are on a tight budget. By using Facebook which is a free device we can target audiences and promote our show. Setting up a Facebook page means that we can have more interaction with our audience and feed them our ideas and hopefully receive back their thoughts and feelings too.

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Here is one example of a article which was shared onto our Facebook page to get our audiences involved with our production. It gives them an idea of what our performance is going to be about. Also to show how our Theatre Company is true to our manifesto, by presenting that what is happening within the world, currently inspired us to do the piece of theatre.

 

Being an admin member on a Facebook page is great to look at progression in which our page is making – by looking at the stats we can see how many likes we have and in how many days we have acquired these.

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From these graphs we are able to see the ‘buzz’ around our Facebook page, this is where Daniela fits it. She would push us all as a company to share posts and the page so that more people could view and like our page. Meaning that the likes and interaction increases.

new stats

Within a month we raised everything much higher, had many more likes and more people engaging within our page and posts. I believe this is down to the useful tool of being able to merge two social media sites together. Daniela was able to connect Twitter to Facebook – meaning that what she posted on Twitter would then automatically be posted onto our Facebook page. This is such a time saver as for the last few weeks Daniela has been able to just update Twitter with the knowledge that Facebook will be updated too.