Tuesday, May 5, 2009

A VERY successful season!

It's over a week since the season in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival at Swiss House finished - two weeks of excitement, achievement and very real success. Whew!!
We started the season with some bookings and I confess to sleeping very little for the two weeks prior to our opening. My main worry was: What if nobody comes?
I saw the first performance on Tuesday, 14th April and knew that I had no reason to worry about the state of the show itself. The whole thing went with a bang and cast and audience obviously enjoyed themselves. From then on, ticket sales steadily increased. We had a good review in the Age - three stars - on Monday, 20th April and during that second week our audiences grew bigger and bigger and more and more enthusiastic.
We had people staying back to talk to us after the show asking about how they could get to see it again. Would it be travelling around the suburbs? Were there tickets available so they could come again and bring friends? Cards and addresses were exchanged so people could keep in touch with latest developments and I now have quite a list of potential supporters.
We've had regular feed-back from happy audience members through the Silly Old Buggers website and it's still getting between 15 and 24 hits per day, so there is still plenty of interest out there in the show.
My job now is to put together the whole promotional package and see if I can find someone prepared to take the show on as a commercial proposition.
I spent the first few days after we closed trying to edit a video together which would include some close-ups as well as a long shot of the whole show - only to end up totally frustrated. My computer is not powerful enough to do all I want it to do and it seems that my software is also not quite new enough to recognise my new video camera. I haven't time or money to spend on updating and learning new technology so have ended up with just the one straight-through video of the performance on Friday, 24th.
We had a big and very enthusiastic audience that night which means lots of applause, clapping along and a few cheers in the background, and that can't be bad! The limitations of the venue - lighting, distance, framing, etc. - are a problem but I think the end result is adequate as a demonstration of what the show is like and how it was received.
The rest of the promotional package will have the tickets sales summary (which is really quite impressive), some still pics, the Age review and a selection of comments from audience and VIPs who were there and enjoyed it.
I'll be updating this blog again fairly soon, when I've finished the promotional stuff and have time to add some pics and maybe a video clip. I just can't face all that technology again right now!
So - keep your eye on this blog for further developments.
Back to: www.sillyoldbuggers.com.au
or: www.gillianmwadds.com.au

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