13/09/10 - Today we had a visitor called Susan O'Shea who is actually involved in the creation and development of festivals, one festival in particular which is 'Ladyfest'. She gave us an introduction into what festivals are all about and what the festival that she is hosting is about. We made mind-maps on what makes a good festival and discussed the positives and negatives issues and resolutions that come along with the creation of a festival.
She also told us a bit about her Guerilla Marketing techniques that she had previously done to promote her own festival and the sort of things that we can do to promote our festival.
For her festival she did a very original type of Guerilla Marketing that made headlines! Her and her friend made lots of cupcakes and placed them around London with a little message on them about the festival including information like when it was taking place and where it was. This appeared to be very effective as a lot of people attended the event and her creativity was in the press.
Once we had been told about her techniques, we had to start thinking of our own ways that we could promote the festival using Guerilla Marketing. We came up with a couple of ideas and started to think about how they could be applied so we went into the playground and began proceeding with our ideas.
I think this lesson was extremely helpful because it got us all thinking creatively and come up with orginal ideas for promotion.
15/09/10 - Today we identified what our festival was going to be about and discussed the ideas everyone had to put forward. We decided that the theme of the festival would be 'happiness', taking after the annual happiness day. We started to think of names for the festival and created our own logo designs for it.
20/09/10 - In today's lesson, we continued to plan for the festival and worked on what we wanted to inlcude, who will be involved and the equipment that we needed. We had to consider potential health and safety risks, ask various experts for advice on what could be improved in the festival and what we will need to consider when planning a festival.
27/09/10 - Today we discussed the name of the festival and had disagreements on what we thought the overall name of the festival should be. Finally we decided that the name is going to be 'Central Fest'.
29/09/10 -Today we were visited by a professional photographer, Ollie Harp who had come to teach us a bit about photography, taking unique pictures and the roles and equipment needed. He showed us some of his previous work and we had to say what we thought was good and bad about it and why and what made it unique. We split the class up into 3 groups and went around the school and practiced taking professional standard photos and used professional photography equipment. We rotated in roles, being a stylist, reflector, photographer and the model. This was a very interesting lesson and was beneficial as we will be able to use these skills in our festival.
11/10/10 - In today's lesson we went over to the 'CTC site' to see the venue of the event and went over issues such as toilets and entrance facilities for those who are less able.
18/10/10 - In today's lesson we had to get into our groups (performing, arts etc) and do a detailed plan of the event and how we will promote the performing side of the event and the auditions. This was done during the first half an hour of the lesson and we weight up each others idea's to come to final decisions. Once we had made our final decisions, we created a brief outline for our Call for submissions for the auditions to perform at our festival. By creating this, we can now go onto producing a poster and promoting the event.
Today's lesson has been essential and an important part of the process of producing a festival.
01/11/10 - In this lesson, we drew up a checklist on what we needed to do and started to set final dates on our calendars in which these things needed to be completed by. This is so that we had guidelines and didn't fall behind. We began to focus on poster designing, application forms for volunteers and the days that we had to attend assemblies to promote the festival. We also discussed the running order of the festival.
02/11/10 -In todays lesson, we began progressing with the production of the festival by debating on what our identity will be during the festival so that we stand out to the members of the public so they can come to us for help. We decided that we should print our names and job roles on our t-shirt and also have a badge as these are things that we can make ourselves and should be effective.
03/11/10 - Today at lunch we had a meeting with Ben Cole, our school's Events Coordinator and head management for Central Fest about making an application for the volunteers. We also talked about where all of the workshops will be situated within the CTC hall. We discussed certain things we wanted to include such as a popcorn machine for the people watching the movie in the cinema room.
04/11/10 - Today Alberta and I went into assemblies and performed a role play to promote Central Fest including information such as the purpose of the festival, the date, time, target audience etc. I found that using this format of promotion proved to be very successful as it got out point across in a unique way and kept the audience interested.
08/11/10 - In today's lesson we began to create our promotional material for the festival so that the general public will be able to identify who is there to help them during the festival. We made individual badges to stick onto our clothes in case people need any help or advice.
12/11/10 - Today we went to the Lady Fest Girl Fawkes festival at the South Bank Centre as a class to get a taster of what a festival is like and this festival in particular as we worked closely with some of the people from here.
15/11/10 - It is getting really close to the festival now so in today's lesson, we went back into our production groups (performers, arts etc) and finalised any last details and arrangements that needed to be made. In my group, performance, we needed to make decisions and sort out details for the performance that were essential in order for it to go ahead. We started by creating a list of the performers and what they will be performing so that we could give that to Mr. Mackintosh, who is managing the technical side of things such as the music, microphones etc and he could make a start on preparing the equipment. We also started to discuss the time slots for each performer and which ones suited us and them better.
We didn't get to complete this stage but we will arrange to meet in our own time to finalise this.
19/11/10 - I had to get in contact with all of the performers to make sure that they knew what time they had to be in by the next morning and to make sure that they brought in all necessary equipment and instruments. I had to stress how important it was that they arrived on time so that we could give them a brief and so I could go over the running order of the performances.
20/11/10 - Today was the day of our event and I think it went very well. In the morning we provided all of the volunteers with a "Central +" t-shirt and briefed them on how we wanted the day to go, assigning them roles and to a workshop that they will needed at. In order to make it fair, we made up a rotation sheet where they could work at a different stall, so whoever was outside in the first half would come inside for the second half.
22/11/10 - As we already conducted the festival, today's lesson we focused on completing the evaluation of the festival, focusing on the things that went well, can be improved and how it went in general.
29/11/10 - We continued to update our blogs further.
06/12/10 - Today I collected some of the evaluation responses from the visitors that attended.
10/01/11 - I continued updating my blog, completed and uploaded worksheets and finishing journal entries.
In this photo the band are practicing before performing.
In this photo, some of the performers are rehearsing.
