Final Evaluation

Initial aims

Our initial aim of this project was to put on a jungle night. Our goal was for it to be successful and we would judge this based off of the tickets sold and how people spoke about it afterwards. There are many events like our one but to make ours a little different we advertised "jungle themed dress up" and we decorated the venue towards the jungle theme. Our night wasn't inspired by anyone in particular, we just both enjoy drum and bass and jungle music and events like ours are usually popular with young people.

What went wrong

Ellie and I arrived at the Latest Music Bar at the time we had scheduled with the bar which was 3pm. We were let in by a man and that was the last person we saw working at the place until about 6pm and we had booked the bottom room and bottom bar. Ellie and I had to move half a stage worth of chairs upstairs by ourselves without knowing if this is where they should've been put. We spoke to the bar manager and he thought we had booked the upper floor which wasn't right so the downstairs bar wasn't staffed for the night, this is where things started to go wrong. The bouncers got there at 7:50pm, this is when the bar staff found out it was a 17+ event and not an 18+ event (which we had discussed in the meeting) and they decided it was going to be a dry bar. We argued against this because this wasn't the plan. They then found 30 wristbands which they were going to give to the people who were aged 18 or older, so they could tell the ages of people when they saw them drinking to try and eliminate the underage drinking.

The doors to the event opened. Bag searches happened as usual and the bouncers were confiscating alcohol from the underage people which is fair enough. I think this stressed the owners out so they got two more bouncers so then we had 4 bouncers. Downstairs everything was running smoothly, it was upstairs with the bouncers that it was going wrong. People were trying to smuggle alcohol in so they decided to close the doors and not let new people in at 9:30pm unless they had bought a ticket online. The owner sat down with us and told us they were going to shut it down at 11pm when it was supposed to finish at 12am. This is because of people trying to bring in alcohol but they shut the doors at 9:30pm so it didn't matter what time it ended because no one else was allowed in.

Many people began to get kicked out or not let back in. This is because the bouncers made two points that people couldn't pass if they were going out for a cigarette. However they didn't inform every person of this so many of my friends were not let back in to the event because of this. I saw this unveil and my friends were confused as they didn't get told so argued back and the bouncers were calling them things like "c**ts" and "cretins". The way the bouncers spoke to us was unnecessary and rude and the way they treated the people attending was out of order. The people that attended will now associate our name with them.

What went well

We made our money back plus profit which was very relieving. I know quite a bit went wrong on the night but the people I spoke to after the night said they had a lot of fun and enjoyed the night which was the goal. I stayed until the very end and everyone that was left was disappointed that it had to end earlier.

As you can see in these videos and picture, Latest Music Bar was busy. We only had 26 tickets left by the end of the night which was a success. The music matched the theme perfectly and the decorations which you can see a bit in the background, worked well to the theme and we got compliments on how it looked after.

These are the photos of the decorations we did on the night and I think they looked very effective. They matched our theme completely and would be a good backdrop for people to take photos in front of as a make shift photobooth, which next time if we did a similar thing, would be a good thing to advertise. The only problem was that when the lights were on, you couldn't see the colour of our tissue paper flowers. However we still tried it out and know for next time.

Individual Work and as a Group

Ellie and I worked well as a team. The whole event as a whole ran pretty smoothly so that shows we worked well as a team. The fact that we made our money back off the tickets shows that what we did was effective and we worked well together in what we were doing. We separated the jobs so that things could get done quicker. Ellie sorted the DJs who made the night, they were very good and everyone seemed to love them. She was also the one in contact with the venue so sorted all the things with the Latest Music Bar. I made the jungle vines for the event and they looked very effective and followed the theme very well. I also created both posters with Ellie's input. I contacted 'Disrupted Events' who are a small rave group who put on raves in the Brighton area. Their snapchat gets 600+ views within the Brighton area and I think his promoting was one of the things that sold a lot of tickets as it got lots of shares from his account and on the night he posted it we sold around 20 tickets.

Skills

We had good organisational skills as we stayed on top of what we needed to do throughout the course of putting our event on. The thing that I think helped us stay so organised was the diaries. Making a plan for each week gave us something to be working towards and have completed at the end of the week. This is a skill that I have learnt throughout putting this event on as things need to be done by the date of the event and if you haven't completed everything then you're making things a lot harder for yourself on the day, and things don't need to be hard.

One downfall for me during this event was the communication skills. We didn't have personal email addresses of the people we were going to meetings with and didn't have any phone numbers if we needed to contact the Latest Music Bar, we only had what had been put on their website. This has been a learning curve and next time I book any venues anywhere, I will make sure to take contact details. Communication skills have also been learnt over the course of project 1, especially when we were stuck with questions on the day of the event and had no way of them being answered as we had no contact details.

What would you do differently next time?

There are a few things I would do differently next time. I would lean towards doing an 18+ event because that eliminates a lot of licensing stress. Either this or I would do a daytime event as things are less likely to get rowdy. I would also never use the Latest Music Bar again. I would try and organise a second meeting to finalise details of the event of at least email to confirm what has been spoken about in the meeting. Lastly I would research more throughout the duration of putting the event on, this would help ,e understand more about licensing laws for an under 18's event and I could get more ideas from other people. I would do more research next time.

Final Major Project (FMP)

For my final major project Ellie and I are planning on putting on another club night in Brighton. This time it will be an 18+ event which will follow a theme more closely than last time. We will need to work on our promoting skills a bit better this time round as we relied on word of mouth and many of my friends will be unable to attend because they are under 18 so they will not be able to attend and won't be able to tell their friends.