Wednesday 24th November 2010 - Festival

Today we went to Brune Park at 9AM to join with the other Diploma students to begin brainstorming and planning our festival project (a Comedy Festival at Brune Park on Wednesday 23rd March 2011).

We first went to their new Diploma room and met with Annabel Cook who explained the issues and the core information needed to plan a festival like this. She told us about past experiences of hers when planning events like this and problems that may, and will, come in our way during the planning process and in the final result. For example, the fact that this will be held in a school, which makes the performance less likely to be viewed as 'professional' and the main audience would be our friends and families.

Once Annabel had left we broke into small groups and mind-mapped 'realistic' ideas for the festival and then pitched our group ideas to the rest of the group. We then took part in a drama thing to make us break down the barrier between the people in the whole group. We had to walk around and follow people from different schools around, choose someone from another school and tell them two true things about us and one fake thing.

We then mind-mapped needed job roles in groups of mixed schools and went around the groups with all of our ideas.

We then designed a logo and a name for the festival and suggested ideas of the teachers to do as a finale at the end of the festival to finish the unit. I looked at the sound system and behind the stage to see what the space and equipment that we were available to was like and what we had to deal with.

Campaign: Wednesday 10th November 2010

Over the past few weeks we've been working on our Scene, Performance and Record Units, making sure that we got them all completed and ready to be sent off before the Christmas holidays. Today we properly started the Campaign Unit, where we're going to organise and put on a comedy festival at Brune Park Community College on Wednesday 23rd March 2011. We began the day by talking about Guerilla Advertising, which is when advertisement is done out of the ordinary to make people remember what happens in it and what they are advertising. It is sneakily and creatively done for these purposes. Most, if not all, viral ads are guerilla advertisements. Popular examples of guerilla marketing are T-Mobile, Nike, and Nokia N96 advertisements. T-Mobile is the most popular of all. It features people randomly dancing to a mash-up of songs in a Liverpool train station. As the dance progresses and more and more people join in and it shows shots of people getting out their phones and calling people about it and filming it. This video amazed millions and had everyone talking.

Guerilla marking is basically to use the minimum budget and to get the maximum impact from it. Quite a lot of guerilla marketing campaigns use static stickers that they place everywhere: on cars, shop windows, people, the floor, and posters.

We watched various videos on YouTube and discussed how they used simple things to make a giant impact.

Today we got into groups of three and planned ways that we would like to use Guerilla advertising. We came up with the idea of putting hundreds of static stickers around school on the walls and in classrooms and putting up posters to advertise. Other groups had ideas like: having a Father Christmas run through the end of term assembly to advertise, t-shirts for our diploma group that we would wear each Wednesday from January until Wednesday 23rd March 2011. We also had the idea of a chalked red nose in the precinct or in school, a red exercise ball that we could play giant football with to create a viral ad, we also thought about doing some 'Jackass' style stunts for a viral ad, and some morph suits, snow writing with red food colouring, run around the school field in red pants, practical jokes, parody songs, karaoke in the Quad, fitness session, clown in the Quad, viral ad - "Red Nose Bomb", and dancing in the hall at lunch.