Working as part of Red Velvet Theatre was an extremely interesting learning curve. Logistically there was a huge amount to coordinate when pitching our play. Important was to establish our goals as a company and what we wanted to demonstrate through our production of violence and sons.
As production manager it was important for me to establish our companies mission. I very much focused on how this production of violence and sons would be able to reach out to the younger community. I am passionate about making theatre accesible to all different types of people but espeically those who are under represented and often miss the chance to see theatre. Due to this I worked very close to Will who was head of Education . Together we looked in detail at what charities we could work with in order to make our production meaningful to those who don't get the chance to see theatre. The Themes of the play include , normalisation of rape , violence , father and son relationships living with little money and more. Due to this there is a very big sense of broken home . Therefor one charity we were very keen to work with was the mulberry bush foundation . It not only is a charity that focuses on children growing up in broken homes but also it is a school. Therefor a perfect foundation to work with in order to carry out our companies goals.
Pulling out the contentious themes of the play was something our company felt very important. Therefor in all areas of production we were looking at ways to pull out these themes. Thus why we had such an emphasis on the set, using the themes of the abusive fathers playground to establish location. Furthermore also the location of Cardiff. This is espeically important as many big ports had a huge decline in the 20th century leaving huge financial pressure. This is clearly important background when looking at Violence and Sons and the character of the Father especially.
When presenting our idea for the play we had a very clear compas creatively. This was due to the amount of work we had put into discussing why the play was so important to us and how we would use our creative assets to present this. We also worked collectively in order to make sure that logistically our creative ideas worked. This was espeically important when we were looking at set design and props. As these things had huge potential of breaking our budget. However by looking at alternative ways to source materials we were able to overcome this. Similarly with marketing there were many costs to consider that we had not considered originally. These consisted of looking at printing costs and also costs of press events. However again we managed to utilise the companies connections in order to source places where we could get people to work as a favour , for example our Film Maker. This again cut costs massively and allowed us to keep our creative ideas.
However one thing our company did lack was detailed logistic planning. As we had a very creative focus there were things that slipped our minds during the presentation. Often it wasn't a case that we had not worked out these logistics but more that we had not explained them properly in our presentation. Detailed planning on how each sector will execute effectively is something hugely important and in order for funders to trust the company these details must be clearly ironed out. For our set we had not clearly presented how we would deal with the large shipping container. More detail of how we would take apart and put back together the container was needed. Lack of detail was largely due to our huge creative push with set which meant we forgot to focus on the more technical side. We also should have had more detail on health and safety. Broader research on marketing statistics would have also benefitted our company. Again in this case we had been creatively focused on making our posters , funny tweets and trailers . Due to this we had forgotten the importance of looking at other less creative strategies that our widely used by theatres such as newsletters , press events and using the theatre to promote.
Although our presentation lacked clarity in logistics overall we worked very well as a company to produce a high quality proposal. We were hugely creatively driven and with more time our technicalities would have been further ironed out. However we were able to keep to budget and had some really interesting ideas about making Red Velvet Theatre accessible to all. Overall I feel we executed our main aims for our company.
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