Welcome to the 2024 And Scene festival budget – now in three flavours. “pie-in-the-sky”, early days, and final budget balance sheet. Don’t go cross eyed though, numbers might be boring but they tell one hell of a story. In the case of And Scene festival we started our budget loosely – this was a function of wildly guessing how much things might cost if we were to go all out. Let’s call this the “Cate Blanchett” budget, a joke I became fond of – how much would it cost to make this a festival worthy of a famous person attending? Too much as it turns out. This early budget worked as a scoping exercise for the festival rather than a complete or even vaguely realistic budget. Without any members of the class experienced in running a festival we had fun throwing some random numbers against the wall.
The second image could roughly be described as our “early days budget”. This was made early on and updated only sporadically. At this point I hadn’t quite taken ownership over the budget – I took on more oversight of the budget as the festival went on (particularly in May). To me this version of the budget represents the festival as it shaped up and more realistic numbers came into play – early fundraisers had gone well, but costs were beginning to mount. As I took ownership of the budget I then updated it to its final form which involved a fair bit of figuring out how to make excel formulas update correctly, and to better figure out the particular categories of the budget.
Obviously the purpose of the budget to the festival is of paramount importance. The budget should guide the festival and continue to set a scope and means. My feelings on the budget are therefore mixed – I feel as if I’d have taken ownership earlier that it might have ended post festival in a better place. I’m hyper-aware that we’ve ended the festival still in the red with costs rapidly mounting during the production of the festival itself. The next steps will be sorting out the invoices and reimbursements. The budget in its final form represents a list of success and failures – the success are that almost every single outgoing expense resulted in a fantastic festival for attendees. We were fortunate that very few expenses felt truly wasted (save a few vital items). The expenses and income though also represent a failure on my part – the lack of income was harmful, expectations around fundraising, ticketing, and merchandising could have been better communicated (or even discovered) earlier in the festival. All in all this artefact of making is an unusual one, and its effects may persist beyond the end of this class.