393 Goes Hyper

Well I began my 393 experience last Wednesday, which was exciting and scary at the same time. Im doing my 393 a bit differently, instead of doing it for a company, I'm doing it for an event- Hyper Festival- which will be happening on the 31st of August 2008. The event is run by the City of Swan, but I am part of a project team which is focused directly on the Hyper series.

As part of the Hyper festival, we will be running a month long art exhibition at the Midland Gate shopping centre and a number of Heist all-ages hip-hop gigs as part of the lead up to the actual music festival on the 31st. The events are all-ages and are aimed primarily at kids in he City of Swan area.

I am lucky to be coming in pretty early on in the planning stages of the festival and began my 393 experience on Wednesday with a meeting with Paul Sloan (from Heatseeker and Supersonic) to discuss possible line-up options for the festival. I learnt that it is important to consider bands that have a new record or are releasing a new record in the coming months and will be touring at around the time of the festival. Paul books alot of tours (Heatseeker is an online ticketing website, much like Ticketek, so he is familiar with the touring schedules of many bands) and he was an invaluable source of information at the meeting. It was a great meeting, and we were all encouraged to volunteer names of bands to play at the festival. At the end of the meeting we had a long list of bands for Paul to suss out and get back to us about.

Then we went to the possible location for the festival to do a site walk and ponder what kind of things we wanted to include. Idea's such as a mini skate park, wakeboarding, festival rides and market stalls were mentioned. The positions of the three stages were tentatively decided upon- but we will need to meet with the sound tech guys to make sure that this will work. We also discussed where to put things like food stalls and toilets (obviously not too close together) and where the fence line would be to ensure stage access for backstage crew. It was great too be there for this brainstorming and it highlighted the large amount of work we have to do before August.

My second day was on Sunday. The City of Swan strongly encourages youth involvement, and alot of high school students and other university students from the area are involved in the planning of the Hyper festival. We discussed the planning of the art exhibition, which will begin on the 7th of July. As part of the exhibition we are running a poster competition- to design the Hyper music festival poster. We have sent out info packs to all local high school art programs about the festival and the poster competition, and we are hoping to get a large number of responses. The top ten posters will be on display at the exhibition, with the winner being announced at the end of the first week. The art exhibition will feature visual, fashion and performance art and we are hoping to use the exhibition as a large promotional tool to promote the music festival to our target audience.

We discussed other promotional tools, such as sponsorship, media releases, advertising and promotional giveaways, but we will not be able to finalise anything until the marketing budget gets confirmed later this week.

So two days in- and I am loving it already. I hope the rest of you are having as much fun as I am. And I hope you are all prepared for me to plug the hell out of this festival once the lineup is announced. Because you will all be attending- right?