Author: Christopher Lee Petit

Over the last few weeks, we at railcard have been planning our marketing strategy and after discussing our project with the marketing manager of the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre we started to work on creating a poster and a name for our piece. We decided originally on the working title, “How to: Adult” however this didn’t fully reflect the show that we were looking to perform so after discussions with the full cast we settled on the name “Ungraded”.

With this in place it was time to begin working on the shows poster where we were able to hire out a space that reflect the environment we want to set our piece in.  While there we were also able to take cast headshots ready to use in the future.

We have also started writing the script delegating scenes to certain people to write where we will then all re-join and adjust scenes to match what each other has written  so we can take the best of hat each person has written and include that in each character.

Over the past few weeks as the company formed we first discussed what roles each other would like to take on, what previous experience we have had and what our individual strengths are. After our discussion I was given the role of marketing within the company based on my previous experience. This was a role I was happy to accept as it is an area I have a personal interest in and it gives me the opportunity to learn programmes I have not had previous experience in.

Once we had decided on roles we discussed ideas for our performance.  We had decided that we would like to utilise a verbatim aspect of theatre. We knew that we wanted to target the 16-25 age bracket so each member of the company went and did some market research and found out that the people of that age range would be interested in seeing.  Most of our feedback suggested that we follow a route that would not be too serious, it was the lighter hearted plays which appealed to that age group more.

Over the past week we have been able to start building on our performance and begin the devising process through improvisation.