On July 11th of last year I wrote a pretty brief post that didn’t say a whole lot about the show, other than the fact that it went a lot better than any of us had anticipated it to - a tidbit I still agree with 100%. But there was something more notable about that post than that pithy statement: the fact that I didn’t have a whole lot to say about the show as a whole. This, I think, was due primarily to exhaustion. GVY was one of the most - if not the most - exhausting creative projects I’ve ever embarked on. With this exhaustion came a lot of education.
Here is my attempt to relay some of those educational messages to you in the method I know best: bullet form.
- Long term schedules are good - Self-explanatory. A lack of a schedule certainly allows for a certain degree of flexibility, but with that flexibility comes a lot more headaches.
- Consistent meetings are also good - One of the big headaches regarding the sketch show involved trying to work around everyone's work and personal schedules, resulting in a meeting at 8 in the morning one day and 9 at night the next. In hindsight I'm not sure if this could have been avoided - then again, perhaps it could have if I had taken bullet point 1 better to heart.
- Divide up tasks - This was done to a certain extent, but not to its fullest potential.
- The summer before everyone leaves for college is not the best time to try to embark on an insanely huge project - Again, self-explanatory.
- Your booker doesn't give a crap about you - This may not always be true, but it certainly felt so in our case. This reads rather pessimistically. Perhaps it should be changed to something like:
- Find a booker who cares about you (if possible) - Oh, two fun stories about our booker, by the way: one, we were promised to have a person to turn on the lights/plug in mics come in at 4. I think he ended up getting in here around 5, to little fanfare, wasted rehearsal time and no apology. And two: on the calendar of events located at the venue we performed at, we were listed as SKETCH REHEARSAL.
- Don't be too concerned about making money - Luckily we weren't, but I would like to note that if we were, we would have made only about $200 to be divvied up amongst us.
- Don't be too concerned about getting noticed - Again, luckily, we weren't. This is not to say that we weren't noticed, or that nobody came to the show; on the contrary, we may have broken a fire code or two thanks to the size of our audience. But keep in mind that said audience was primarily composed of friends and family members. I'm doubtful that a single person came to our show that none of us knew.
- Do it because you love it - The prior two points have been kind of leading up to this one, so I'm hoping this isn't any huge surprise. But it's worth saying. There really was no reason for us to do that show, other than perhaps to see whether or not we could do it, which if you ask me isn't the strongest reason for investing a lot of time and effort in something.