Although in the end I had varied roles on this production, my first and probably most important was to scout and organise a venue for the festival to be held at. To assist with this task, the class undertook a walking tour of the various venues in Melbourne’s CBD. This for me and the class allowed a visualisation of this festival to begin, as we walked from venue to venue we could start slowly thinking and planning how our event may look. It also let us understand how accessing a venue can feel from an audience perspective, whether it be an easy or hard undertaking as well as how it made you feel arriving at the doors, whether it be grand or disappointing.
Once production kick started, the directors immediately approached me with a keen interest in RMIT’s Capitol theatre. This led to talks and questions that arrived at a conclusive ‘yes’ from the production team to book the Capitol for our ‘And Scene’ festival. To do this, I first had to contact Darren Brown, the venues manager, which ‘got the ball rolling’ on finding a date and time slot for our festival. This is where we got our first lot of good budgeting news with a 0$ booking fee on the venue. Eventually it manifested into my artifact from the festival, the And Scene venue booking sheet report. This is important to me as it is a triumph for trying something that I had not done before, with going out and contacting a third-party organisation to acquire something that benefited the festival, displaying an interpersonal skill that made me realise my value as a production member. This of course helped the studio by providing our venue for the first two days and nights of the festival and gave us a set of parameters to work with, that being time constraints on the booking.
To get a better idea and realization of this venue, we conducted a tour with Darren in week 7 who showed us through the various rooms and spaces. This gave us information about capacity, hosting, and technical capabilities. The tour allowed for the Capitols sense of grandness to be passed onto the team and gave us a better idea of how we might want to use its presence as an exhibit itself. Overall, undertaking the task of venue scouting gave me confidence in a production setting and allowed me to develop my communication skills as well as showing that I can attribute to a greater scale event by applying myself in roles that I am unfamiliar/unconfident in.