At the start of the project, I emailed multiple venues and artists to see which were available and interested.
First of all, I spoke to Kala Sangam and The Underground but unfortunately, they did not have rooms available on my desired date. I then decided to try TheMill.TV and to my surprise they were available:
After this, we agreed to meet at the venue on 3rd March 2022 to discuss everything else in person and have a look around.
Next, I got in touch with Bradford Producing Hub’s Music Instigator to find out about the ‘Spare Bob’ grant.
She then sent me a list of possible artists to work with:
From this, I listened to each of the artist’s music and contacted those I was interested in working with.
After these turned out to be unsuccessful, I asked other people I knew for suggestions of artists they knew. In the meantime, I realized that the date I had booked was not going to work for me personally due to ‘double-booking’ myself. So, I sent another email to Jim asking him if he and the venue were available on another day.
After weighing out my final options, I spoke to 3 students at the college on the level 3 extended course and decided to have their external bands perform as either the headline slot or supports. This will help me to gain as much support as possible because each band has an existing fanbase, and original music and are easily contactable due to their being in the same building as I am.
I then met up with them to discuss the look of the projection mapping and what colour schemes they were aiming for. This also helped me to start working out equipment lists and genres of music to use in the changeover music playlist on Spotify.
Notes from the first meeting with the bands
After this, it was back and forth with the bands asking them for photos I could use of them on in some promotional social media posts and answering their questions. These were more often than not about tickets. For example, when would they be live, where they could be bought from, can under 18s come?
I then relayed these questions to the venue. I let them know that I wanted to have the tickets live by April 1st so that there were 5 weeks available for people to buy tickets and reiterated that they would be £3 so that they are affordable and therefore may attract more people. After this short conversation, Jim requested that we have a call to discuss more important matters.
During the call, he asked me about the under-18s and the equipment we would need. This then created a long conversation between the bands and I for weeks up until the day before the show. The bands all had access to guitar amps and their own instruments apart from bass amps and drum kits. They even had their own breakables but it was not enough. Thankfully after a lot of confusion, we came up with the solution to use a drum kit borrowed from college and New Model Army (a local band, that uses the venue to rehearse and who is tour managed by Jim) allowed us to use their bass amp, which was already stored in the venue.
The final conversations I held prior to the event were to show the bands my projection mapping ideas and give them the opportunity to provide feedback before any final adjustments were made and ask them if they had any requests for music to be played between their sets during the changeover.
