On the side of interning...

On the side of SWEvents I managed to pick up a shift for the Urban Couture fashion show during the Joondalup Festival.

This was an event I picked up through working with Kelly Price at SWEvents.  Kelly is a freelance events coordinator, who was hired by Shani to help out with the Wesfarmers Concert and was also employed by City of Joondalup to coordinate the fashion shows of the festival.

The fashion shows ran over four weekends, and Kelly asked me if I’d like to come and help out on one of the shows over the last weekend.

Our main concern with these shows was a lack of knowledge about them. It was noticed that Joondalup didn’t really produce much in the lead up to the show, so one of the first issues I had to tackle was public awareness.  Easy considering all you had to do was walk up to people and hand out flyers. 

The second issue we faced was the weather.  If the rain came the show was cancelled, no contingency planning needed as we couldn’t bring in any new marquees into the already set up festival, and each show had already been designated to a specific location, there were no alternative spaces for the show to take place.

In the case of the day I was working, the first show managed to avoid any extreme weather.  The second was hit with heavy rain and as such the show was cancelled. The team was able to pull together a quick photo shoot with no spectators but able to use for the festival and for Urban Couture.

In contrast to working with SWEvents on large corporate events, it was interesting to see the difference to working with a smaller freelance event manager. 

I noticed a lack of tasks for volunteers at the fashion show, obviously due to skill management and knowing that volunteers are just that and cannot be expected to have any knowledge of event operations.  Having said that I definitely enjoy my responsibility load with Shani and value how she trusts me to take on my daily tasks and produce work at the end of each day.  The experience proved to myself that I am ready to handle a more involved position, rather than the more simple tasks volunteers are taken on for.

Fashion was something that I was interested in making a career from, but after my experience (or lack of) for Joondalup festival the idea of it has been made slightly different.  It would be more interesting to be a part of the planning process like I have been doing with SWEvents to be able to understand and feel apart of the event.

Grace Carpenter

15660677

SWEvents