Show Name and Print Design

Our show finally has a name!

Kalopsia

noun. The delusion of things being more beautiful than they really are.

We agreed that this Greek word applied well to our show as we wanted to show the side of love that isn’t glorified in cinema, the real, gritty, mundane, exciting, side of love. Kalopsia is what happens in film, our show aims to establish and combat that.

Now comes that all-important time to give our show a branding and a public-facing presence, as well as us as a company. We have sourced an in-kind designer to create our print for us, giving him designs we created ourselves for inspiration and allowing him to create the final image for audiences to see.

I mocked up some sketches of potential design ideas as follows:

IMG_3929IMG_3930

We had the idea of creating something that people associate with love, yet giving it a twist to show something less commonly seen in films, such as empty pizza boxes, tissues, remote controls, general mess, dirty underwear, etc.

However, the premise of our show changed somewhat during this process – we revisited the name ‘Kalopsia’ and its meaning and decided that rather than focusing exclusively on love as the form of ‘delusion’ we discuss, we wanted to look at the way people view their everyday lives and what delusions we imagine on a day to day basis, i.e. the way we perceive ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, going back to the idea of reception theory that we discussed in our first rehearsal. Many of these situations within the narrative of our show will also focus on love, therefore we wanted to implement that into our print, yet also show more of an element of the human and humanity: each individual has their own delusions.

After being in talks with our designer regarding this, he sent us some mock-up images of potential designs:

 

We agreed that the anatomical heart both showed the idea of love, the idea of reality as opposed to the delusion (a cartoon heart – shown in the title) and the idea of humanity. We wanted to have the title of the show resembling a dictionary definition as we knew many people wouldn’t know what Kalopsia meant, and to tell them how to say it through phonetically breaking it up. We also agreed that having the definition under the title would also give people an insight into what the show was about, as well as adding a recognisable yet ‘quirky’ twist. From here, we are to finalise a design and get it completed, as well as creating the final copy and back of the flyers for our shows, and getting it all printed! We have set aside a printing budget of £100 which we will hopefully stick to, but since our designer was in-kind we have some leeway to go over this if needed.

 

Social Media Marketing: the early stages

The first few weeks of marketing have been very successful. As something I’ve never really done before, I was apprehensive about the time management side, understanding algorithms, and gaining a decent following. However, what these past few weeks have proved is, it’s a lot more fun than I was expecting!

So what have we been getting up to?

Facebook

IMG_7468

Our Facebook page is by far the social media account that our audience is interacting with the most. We have over 300 likes, and our posts are reaching over 5,000 people. It has been proven that videos are the most powerful marketing tool on Facebook, so we’ve been uploading little snippet videos from rehearsals regularly, a lot of the time using the ‘Boomerang’ app. Boomerang records videos on a four second loop, making the image appear to go backwards and forwards – it’s a great little way of previewing our work without giving too much away, and they’re fun to watch!

Since videos are such a great way to connect with our audience, we decided to create a video advert on Facebook which will be pushed out to a select audience of our choosing (18-50 year olds). We used a Boomerang video from a movement rehearsal, and within an hour of the advert going live, it had already reached 80 people outside the organic audience (people who like our page and their friends).

img_3577

Something we have also been doing on our Facebook page is introducing our company members individually to get a better connection with an audience, allowing them to know a little bit about each of us. We’ve been posting these daily between 13:00-14:00, the peak hours for Facebook use in the week as people at work are often on their lunch breaks and want to catch up with social media.

img_3578

Within this, we tell our viewers three things each company member loves the most, keeping the theme of our upcoming show, love, in people’s minds. It also emphasizes people as individuals and what sets each other apart, something deeply rooted in our company manifesto.

Something else that is happening on our Facebook page is the promo for our first fundraising event! We are holding a quiz all about love on the 7th March and have gained a lot of interest through promoting the quiz and the prizes to our Facebook followers.

img_3575

The event information reads:

The Pin Hinge Collective presents

The Quiz of Love!

Think you know about love? Reckon you know your rom-coms from your tear-jerkers? Bet you’re clued up on your famous couples? Can you REALLY remember the lyrics to that cheesy 80s ballad you always attempt?
Test your trivia at The Swan with some VERY exciting prizes to be won, including
PAINTBALLING FOR 4 as the GRAND PRIZE!

There will also be a raffle for the chance to win a romantic stay in a B&B for two lucky people!

£2 to play
Teams of no more than 4!
All proceeds go towards our fundraising campaign for our new show.

Details of our company and show can be found at:
facebook.com/thepinhingecollective
twitter.com/pinhingetheatre
thepinhingecollective.wordpress.com

We’d love you to be there!

This event has been viewed by 269 people and reached a total of 1.8k, but of course due to venue size this large number would not be possible…

We’re aiming to have around 60-70 people attend and to hopefully achieve this, we’re going to do a countdown to our event as a reminder, and push the event through sharing and Facebook advertising.

Instagram

Instagram has also proved a popular tool, however not so much so as Facebook. Far fewer people use Instagram than Facebook so the difference in numbers isn’t surprising, as well as Instagram being far less interactive and familiar to use than Facebook. However, we post Instagram updates regularly, focusing on mainly photographic material than videos, although Boomerang videos are also now incorporated into Instagram so we do tend to replicate relevant videos on there as well as Facebook.

IMG_7469

Since our show will be very visual, we understand that our Instagram use will develop as the show does, and in turn, our audience engagement will increase. However, the engagement we’ve been getting so far is excellent, we’ve been getting lots of likes on our photos and the correlation between Instagram likes and Facebook likes is interesting to watch, as people who like one page often go and visit the other.

Twitter

img_3585

Our Twitter experience has been somewhat different from Facebook and Instagram. We’ve found it hard to establish a following due to the large amount of ‘traffic’ on Twitter and accounts/tweets getting lost in the masses. I believe the next way to get around this is promoting our Twitter account on Facebook to make people more aware of it, and engaging with other theatre companies and venues in order to make a connection!

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

In the beginnings of our process we established that we wanted to discover what it means to be human, what makes people individuals, and how our individuality defines us.

From our discussions around this topic, we conducted an exercise using Wikipedia, whereby we would start on a page concerning something related to identity (e.g. fingerprint) and click a link to a different page from here; write down information on this; click another link; and so on.

What this left us with was post-it notes. A lot of post-it notes.

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

Many of these post-it notes sparked conversation, and we believed lots of them could act as great stimuli for a show, yet two stood out in-particular:

Role Theory is the way our self-imposed ‘role’ in society (e.g. mother, teacher, etc) dictates the choices we make in life. George Herbert Mead, a psychologist and philosopher talked about the ‘self’ as a social process, where we ‘build’ our identities out of societal norms and assign these roles to ourselves through play as children. We learn to occupy a role, yet as we age we become less and less aware that we have fulfilled them.

This inspired us to complete a writing task. We sat for five minutes continually writing, answering the question “who are you?”

These stories were read out, ideas were circulated and themes dissected. All of our stories were very different from the last; some were fictional, some were anecdotal, some were poetic, some were very brutal. What we found from these stories was that we tended to discuss what we believed our roles, goals and aspirations were in some way. From this we developed exercises to determine our opinions on certain statements about ourselves. One of these exercises was walking around the room and sitting down when a statement was read out that we believed to be true to us, e.g. “I base my happiness on others.” We also stood at either the left or right sides of the room depending on which option we would choose, e.g. “A job you hate with brilliant pay, or a job you love that pays next to nothing?”

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

It wasn’t until after a long time improvising and playing with these ideas our stage manager, Dan, made a brilliant point:

Every one of you keeps talking about love.

A career or love?

Love or money?

Unrequited love or forbidden love?

It was from there that we knew we’d cracked it. Each and every one of us knew what it was like to be in love, or be loved, or know someone who was in love. It is a universal concept that we all had first-hand experience in and spoke about all the time in casual conversation, not just when work-shopping ideas. How did our different experiences of love make us who we are? How were they similar to other people’s? How were they different?

We decided to bring this idea back around to our aim of using narrative-driven performance and story-telling; so that’s exactly what we did. Told stories.

The stupid things, the annoying things, the brilliant things, the ‘insignificant’ things about love. Things that only you and your significant other do (or so you thought…). The things that make you laugh. Your daily routine. Your favourite memories together. Anything and everything about love. The every day love, the outlandish love, the lack of love.

Processed with VSCO with b5 preset

From these stories we created improvisations, from these improvisations we started to see characters, and from characters, well, who knows where we’ll end up next…