The role of Producer: Final Blog Post

Introduction to Producing our Theatre Company/ Initial Ideas

At the start of this Theatre Company module, we started as 10 individuals with no common cause, however during this process we fount that by working closely together and creating a strong bond through communication, teamwork and hard work we have produced that common cause of creating theatre our target audience of 16-24 year old’s can relate to. This blog will be spilt into six sections detailing my roles within the company which details my individual progress and contribution throughout this process and also highlights my groups progress that evolved us into an actual theatre company that are viewed as professional.

During our initial meetings at the start of this module, our group had the idea of creating a new theatre company that tackles issues surrounding young people aged 16-24. We decided to call our theatre company Railcard Theatre, as Railcard’s are offered to 16-24 year old’s. We thought by including the name of Railcard, the idea of creating theatre for 16-24 year old’s would be extremely clear to the public. To try and find an idea that focused on this theme, we decided to conduct market research. ‘Some research is “basic,” useful primarily to other researchers. Some is “applied,” relevant to everyday life. Both are essential. And most artists do some of both, creating experimental work that pushes the form as well as work that is more’ (Simonet, 2014). As evidenced in the quote, research can be basic or applied with both helping the researchers find what they are looking for. This is what we tried to find when conducting our market research, as I feel we conducted Applied research as we were asking friends and family members in that age range about what theatre they like to see and what type of show would they like to see at the theatre which tackles issues for 16 to 24 years old’s. The answers we were given, were mostly the same as most people we asked wanted to see theatre that they could relate to and was accessible for them. They feel high end theatre in the west end was not relevant or accessible to them and if there was a local play that they could relate to, they would go and see the show. After discussing this feedback, we felt that we should base our show around a Post graduate who has got his first teaching job in a secondary school, as we feel our target audience could relate to the experience of the fear of stepping into the unknown after education and including tension by not knowing if our main character would love or hate his new job.

After deciding on our concept, the time had come to set roles for our theatre company. During a workshop with our tutor Mark, we had all our roles in place, as demonstrated in the picture above and included on the main page. When choosing the role of producer, at first I was nervous as I have not produced a theatre show before, however at the same time I was excited as being producer gave me the chance to do something new within Drama and give me a new challenge. ‘The job involves being “responsible for making arrangements for every aspect of the production in order to prepare it for presentation to the public on stage, subsequently managing it during the course of its production run and finally making all necessary closure arrangements” (Baggley, 2008). As evidenced in the quote, a producer’s role is making show a good show is produced within budget and on time, this is the main factor I was excited about, as for once in Drama I was responsible for more than my own acting part, I liked the pressure and organisation of that role, it taught me the benefits of being organised and reliable, which I felt I was during this module.

One of the first jobs I had to do as producer was helping to write our Mission Statement and Manifesto. When writing those, we studied examples from other theatre companies and used the ACE guidelines to help us create two pieces of writing that summed our theatre company up perfectly to potential sponsors and our audience. I believe that in both our mission statements and manifesto they include detailed information like the one Frantic Assembly did. For example they included ‘Frantic Assembly creates thrilling, energetic and unforgettable theatre. The company attracts new and young audiences with work that reflects contemporary culture’ (Frantic Assembly, 2016). This showed us that our Manifesto could not be vague, I feel our overall mission statement and Manifesto, covered our themes of our theatre company in depth.

After developing our mission statement and manifesto, the main point I had to work on as producer was organising and delivering our marketing pitch for Julie Ellerby, the head of marketing for Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, the venue that was hosting our show.

In the picture above, I and Zach my co-producer and Chloe who at the time was director, was working on notes for our pitch and sorting out our initial budget for the pitch to give to Julie. Included below is the document which had my notes for the pitch I was delivering to Julie, my job mainly during the pitch was to give in depth explanations about our budget, especially the prices of our marketing. At the time, we had a plan of spending £82 in total for 10 posters, 1000 flyers and 40 programmes. We thought that would heighten our exposure to the general public that would improve our ticket sales, this number changed during time which is included later in this blog, however Julie was very impressed with our pitch overall, especially our budget, as she said we were one of the most in depth groups in terms of budget and organising our marketing. At this time of the process, we were impressed with our progress after the pitch, we were now looking forward to developing our idea for our show more in the next month.

Notes for Pitch

Works Cited

Simonet, A. (2014) Making Your Life As An Artist. Manitoba: Artists U.

Baggley, L. (2008) What’s the producer’s role? It’s one of the most mysterious jobs in theatre – so let’s find the truth behind the cigar-chewing, money grabbing cliches. (online) The Guardian. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/apr/04/whatstheproducersrole (Accessed 25 April 2016).

Frantic Assembly (2016) What is Frantic Assembly. (online) Frantic Assembly. Available from http://www.franticassembly.co.uk/what-is-frantic/ (Accessed 16 May 2016).

Developing our Idea/Funding

The next step in creating our show was developing our idea of basing our show around a new teacher going into his first teaching job in a dubious secondary school where secrets were surrounding him. To develop this idea further, fellow crew members were devising the script to bring the characters and storyline to life. During these sessions, I felt like I needed to be there being producer to overlook the development of the script and make sure our script was consistent to our themes included in the mission statement of our theatre company. Overall when the script was devised, I was happy that the occurring themes of fear, love and tension which was relatable to our target audience was present in our script. ‘You should only produce something that you have a real passion for and that you would personally want to buy a ticket for and go and see.”’ (Frizell, 2012). As this quote states, producers should only produce work that they would go see, on the basis of the script we created, I feel like our show was strong and I was fully committed in producing this show to the best of my abilities.

After the script was done and the characters was starting to take shape and be three dimensional, we needed a title for our play. At first I had a suggestion of Hey Teacher!, however other group members decided that the title was too strongly based on our main character who is a teacher. To create intrigue to our play we decided to negotiate and create the name of Ungraded, as we thought that name wouldn’t give the main theme of our play away too much, and create the intrigue to the audience in order for them to hopefully buy tickets. ‘Your brand – logos, name and so on – are how you convey that vision, and that matters. It should enable not just audiences but venues, funders, potential partners and others to understand what you’re about.’ (Caines, 2013). This quote helped my understanding, as we needed to create a strong brand and identity for Railcard that would fully encompass our theatre company and match our vision of creating theatre young people could relate to. We needed a logo that would be striking and understandable to the audience. By using my contacts as producer, Iona Carter who is a third year media student with experience in graphic design created our logo. We felt this image, (included below), was a very good representation of our brand and show, that we felt comfortable with advertising in our marketing.

As the show was developing, the next step that I concentrated on as producer was the budget and funding. At the start of the process our theatre company was given a £200 grant from the University of Lincoln. I thought this would be enough money to cover all of our expenses, as we had a lot of props and all of costume in kind, therefore we didn’t need to spend a lot on costume or props. However when developing the show, we decided that we needed to fund raise more funds just make sure we had all of our expenses covered. To fund raise money, we decided to use a internet page called Indiegogo, this allowed us to use our social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to advertise our fundraising page https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/railcard-theatre#/. To give our contributors something back for donating money, we included perks like if you donated £1 we gave you a personal message of thank you, £5 would be a thank you snap and £10 would be a silly snap of all the cast and crew. This worked as we were able to raise a total of £90, this gave us enough money to cover all of our expenses.

If we were a professional theatre company, we would apply for an Arts Council Grant. ‘Grants for the Arts is our open access funding programme for individuals, art organisations and other people who use the arts in their work.’ (Arts Council England, 2016). As stated companies who use the arts in their work can apply for a grant for their production, we were using this as inspiration for our own fundraising, by looking at companies who have been successful in their application and how that money has been useful for their production. Companies like Gob Squad have been successful and this money has helped them to explore technology in their performance, which has been Favorited by their audiences. We understood that funding from Arts Council England is very important for theatre companies, unfortunately time ran out to complete a mock application, however I feel that our funding helped our development of Ungraded.

In our budget that is included in the blog, in total we spent £192 on expenses, which was broken down into 4 sections Props costing £85, Flyers costing £28, Poster costing £24 and Programmes costing £55. This meant we didn’t need to use our fundraising money as all of our expenses were covered by the university grant. However it was nice for us to have that extra money so we didn’t need to worry about overspending.

Budget Sheet

Theatre Company Budget

Works Cited

Frizell, N (2012) What does a theatre producer actually do? (online) Ideas Tap. Available from http://www.ideastap.com/IdeasMag/the-knowledge/what-does-a-theatre-producer-actually-do (accessed 9 March 2016).

Caines, M (2013) 15 tips on setting up a theatre company From funding to fringe festivals, a panel of theatre pros who have been there and done it share their expert insights (online) The Guardian. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/aug/28/expert-tips-setting-up-theatre-company (accessed 16 March 2016).

Arts Council England (2016) Grants for the Arts (online) Arts Council England. Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts (accessed 12 March 2016).

Marketing

During the process, I fount myself taking on other roles, for example half way through April, I was now the assistant marketer. This was to help Chris Petit as he was the main character John Smith in our show and head of marketing, we felt this was too much work for him. My first role as assistant marketer was organising the printing and distribution of the flyers. In the earlier months we budgeted £14.99 for 1000 A5 flyers from an online company called Vista Print. However I felt that these flyers wouldn’t be good enough quality, I decided to go to a local printers in Lincoln called Chameleon print. When I went there I had the design of our flyers (included below) to give to the printers, I felt that given our time frame we wouldn’t hand out 1000 flyers and it would be a waste of money.

I had the idea of quality over quantity, so I ordered 100 A6 flyers on landscape, that gave us the idea to the public that they were form cards to fit in with our school theme. Once I collected them from the printers, the quality was very good as they were on gloss paper and thick card, to give the idea to the public that we are a professional theatre company. ‘the go to market strategy represents the generic direction to be followed in order to accomplish a specific business objective’ (Brand Uniq, 2016). As evidenced in the quote marketing strategy is important for growth and for us ticket sales. To fit in with our marketing strategy, I had the idea of distributing the flyers in shops and spaces in the town centre where our target market 16-24 year old’s hang out in and go in, during their free time and academic time. For example I distributed flyers in HMV, Subway, the University Library and the media building. These are all places our target market have been witnessed going into, I thought that would be a success for our company.

This is the same for poster distribution, as we had 10 A3 posters and 10 A4 posters, we thought having 10 of each size would increase our distribution. This idea worked as when I and Chris handed pout posters in shops in town, we had enough of each to fit with different spaces that the shops gave us. Finally to keep our marketing strategy strong, I distributed a poster in Access to Media college, an educational facility which markets to our demographic. To maximise ticket sales, I used my contacts again, namely my friend Sebastian Edgington-Cole who presents a radio show on Monday lunchtimes on Siren FM. He let me and Chris go on his show to talk about Ungraded, as Siren FM is a community radio show and our show was tailored for the local community, by giving the youth in the community something to do on a Tuesday Night. This interview worked well, as we were both organised and direct to the important points of our show, which would help generate more ticket sales.

Siren FM Interview

Flyers Posters

Works Cited

Brand Uniq (2016) Why Marketing Strategy Is Important For Any Business. (online) Brand Uniq. Available from http://branduniq.com/2012/why-marketing-strategy-is-important-for-any-business/ (Accessed 21 April 2016).

Sound

Another role I was given half way through the process was sound. I was nervous at first to take this role on, as I haven’t done sound for a show before. However given our realistic setting, the sound wasn’t as complicated as I thought. For example the house music was 15 minutes long, I decided on four songs that captured our school setting perfectly as they all had school references in them. The four songs were High School Never Ends – Bowling For Soup, Another Brick in the Wall- Pink Floyd, Don’t Stand So Close To Me- The Police and What I Go To School For? – Busted. On show day these songs worked well as I think they gave the audience an instant sense of the show’s school setting.

Before show day, in my sound cues included in the blog, there were soundscapes for the scenes which as set outside the school, during parents evening and in a bar. However during tech day they were too loud and poor quality for the actors to project their voice over them so Emily the stage Manager and I decided to cut them. We only had one SFX included in the show which was repeated twice, that was the school bell SFX, this was good quality and managed to signal characters entrance and exits in two scenes. The music we had on in the background during our main scene which was the main scene was Don’t Cha -Pussycat Dolls, this gave a sense that this scene was set at a party, as Don’t Cha is a song people can associate with parties. Finally on show day we had an idea to include music during scene changes, these were snippets of the songs we used for house music and also the three songs we didn’t use in the party scene, Don’t You Want Me – The Human League, Never Gonna Give You Up – Rick Astley and Girlfriend – Avril Lavigne. This gave the audience a form of sensory enjoyment during the blackouts, ultimately I think I did a good job of sound, my choices of sound reflected Ungraded well.

Sound Cues

Ungraded Sound Script Ungraded Sound Cue Sheets 1 (1)

Conclusion

To conclude, I feel that my role of producer/sound/assistant marketer did challenge me during this module, however after seeing the show on Tuesday 24th May, I feel comfortable to say that I feel I produced this show to the best of my abilities. We didn’t go over budget at all, everything we needed to do was done in a timely and respectful manner, I feel like our group worked well together and we created a three dimensional show that delved into different scenarios and themes in a school setting, which the audience seemed to enjoy after listening to feedback. I will conclude with a snapshot and a quote of me explaining my journey through this process which was posted on our Facebook Page and used as a marketing tool.

The role of Producer: Final Blog Post – Charlie Watts

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