The Show Must Go On....

Well the event that I have been working towards for the whole of my PR 393 career finally happened. On Sunday the 31st of August 4000 punters descended upon Midland Gate Double storey carpark demanding to be entertained. And from the reviews we have had so far- I think we did a pretty good job.

However, the festival was not without it's problems. A sick band pulling out and a badly timed flu for me meant that the weekend was full of stress, running around and alot of comfort food (doughnut's mostly). The main thing that I learned was that no matter what sorts of curve balls you get thrown during an event, the show must go on...

At about 3pm on the Saturday afternoon we got a call that none of us saw coming: Birds of Tokyo were pulling out because lead singer Ian Kenney had a chest infection and couldnt sing. With less than 24 hours til the gate's opened we were one headliner down, and we had to make some decisions fast. After an emergency doughnut run, our wonderful promoter Paul Sloan (owner of Heatseeeker ticketing and Supersonic events) got on the phone and in an extraordinarily short amount of time had Drapht on his way to fill in for us. Drapht is another quite big named act, who luckily was on his way to Perth anyway for his CD launch. I contacted Triple J and Nova who put it out over the radio that Birds would not be playing and Drapht would be filling in, and sent out messages to our friends on MySpace and Facebook. We decided that because it was such short notice we would offer people a refund at the door if they no longer wished to attend.

Alot of quick thinking had to go into these decisions, and it was great to see how everyone worked together to find the best possible solution for everyone. It was a definite learning curve in how to deal with high pressure situations.

So on into Saturday night.

Because the festival was being held in a shopping centre carpark, we had minimal time to bump in and get things set up. To give you an idea- when I worked on Southbound we had 2 weeks to set up site for punters, on Hyper we had from 5pm Saturday night until doors opened 11.30am Sunday morning. It was pretty tight and we all had to pitch in to get it done. Something else I have learned at festivals- it doesnt matter what your job is, you have to be ready to do whatever needs to be done to get the event happening. So there we were lifting fences, putting up signs, erecting marquee's at 10pm on a freezing Saturday night. Oh yeah, I mentioned I had the flu for all of this, right?

So at about 1am when the fences signs and marquees were all up, we went back to the office for some pizza and a quick debrief to make sure we were all prepped and ready for our jobs in the morning and then went home to bed. Most of us were back there again by 7am to get ourselves ready.

On Sunday morning we all had our separate parts of the festival to get ready. I had to get the box office all set up and ready to go. The box office is where people pick up their tickets if they are VIP's or ticket winners and also where media and photographers come to pick up their passes. I had the tickets and passes arranged in envelopes and alphabetically to make it easier for the staff who would be manning the box office.The box office is also where people wanting refunds would come to collect them. Once that was set up I walked a lap of the festival grounds to make sure I was familiar with where everything was.

And then...... all of a sudden it was 11.30 and people were coming in. As of 11am we had people lining up around the block to come in which was a good feeling. The box office was busy for the first hour and I hung around to make sure everything ran smoothly. Then it was off to my duties as VIP tour guide. I had 6 tours organised throughout the day with various sponsors, councillors and competition winners. Sponsors and councillors I took around the key area's of the festival, introduced them to some local youth's working on the festival and showed them bits of the backstage area's of the festival and how it was all run. The tours went pretty well with alot of them commenting about how well the festival was run and how nice it was to see local kids getting involved in the project.

At 5pm I had a tour arranged for the competition winners from STM and also from RTRfm. For this I had enlisted the help of the artist liaison guru Ben, who had organised to meet me at the back of one of the stages with as many bands as he could swing. I took them backstage to watch Muph n Platonic on the hip hop stage, then went round to meet Ben. He had managed to round up 4 and a half bands (we couldn't find Elora Danan's drummer) for them to meet and take photo's with for the next half hour. It was lovely to see the kids so excited and they all got lots of things signed and photographed. After, I took them to stand on the side of the main stage and watch Drapht play, which they loved. This tour was my favourite part of the day, and it was really great to see how excited the kids all were about being backstage.

Then it was 2 more tours and I had a few minutes to eat some food before we had to start bumping out. The festival had to be mostly packed down by Monday morning and let me tell you, pack down is the last thing you want to do after a busy day like that. All I wanted to do was go home and soak my aching feet and get into bed.

So at 1am on Monday morning after cutting down signs, moving fences and rolling up carpet, I dragged my weary ass home to bed. It was a great festival and we have since had several emails commenting on how well it all went. I have learned so much about publicity and about event management over my 3 months. Now it's just on to the report writing of it all......

Good luck to everyone still doing your placements, I hope you get as much out of it as I have- it's been a rollercoaster and an amazing experience.