“Online technology has made it possible for audience relationships to be reinvented and reputations to be redrawn across the theatrical spectrum” (Carson 2011, P. 181)

Creating a STAMP Theatre Facebook and Twitter profile was a vital step in establishing ourselves as an acknowledged theatre company, and throughout our process we have tried to use each form of social media to its full advantage and get as much public online interest as possible.

Facebook:

Below is a still image from STAMP Theatre’s official Facebook page, and the graph outlines how many people the material on our Facebook profile reached. Having this sort of tool was very useful as it has allowed us to see what elements of creative arts marketing via social media we were either successful or unsuccessful in. Posting both of STAMP Theatre’s teaser trailers reached up to 1400 people via Facebook alone, and various promotional images we posted also reached a great number, this is beneficial as it both keeps audiences interested in our work and gives them an insight into what they will see in our performance, also having a profile online enabled our advertisements to be seen my more people than through the medium of flyers.  The ‘insights’ graph also shows that each time STAMP Theatre posted either a status, image or video that the public also began commenting on our work via their own Facebook profiles or simply ‘liking’ it. When the public do this, their own Facebook friends will see STAMP Theatre’s work, which generates more Facebook activity surrounding our profile and may contribute to ticket sales.

Below is a graph on our company Facebook profile outlining the audience demographics in age that we reached via Facebook, and it shows a majority of our online advertisements reached 18-24 year olds. This reveals how unequal our Facebook audience demographics are, if we were to redo this process we would definitely aim to advertise to a wider demographic in age, but, as we are all students we will obviously attract a large number of audiences around the same age as us. However, to even out the age demographics of our audience we could have possibly looked into advertising on more than just Facebook and Twitter (both of which holds a majority of users in this age bracket), for example community noticeboards online.

An additional positive repercussion of having a company Facebook profile is that not only the company can publicly speak about our work but audiences can as well. By ‘tagging’ our company name, the public who have ‘liked’ our Facebook profile can comment on our work, company and upcoming production. We found this to be both extremely beneficial to our company’s reputation and a cost-free form of advertising, examples of the public’s Facebook statuses about our company can be seen below.

Twitter:

Twitter is quickly becoming an extremely popular social media tool, and a huge majority of Theatre Companys are using it to their advantage. Similar to how we used STAMP Theatre’s Facebook profile, we frequently posted tweets about how rehearsals were coming along, various photographs and links to the LPAC website where the public could buy tickets.

What is so beneficial to a company through Twitter is the concept of ‘mentioning’ and ‘retweeting’, someone could mention our company and work, and provide a link to our own Twitter page, this would then be available to all of that person’s Twitter friends, thus advertising our company to a huge degree. This benefitted us before and after our performance of ‘The Trial’…

Below are examples of the ‘mentions’ STAMP Theatre received from the public prior to our performance. Reading that someone had bought their ticket for our performance may have stirred another to buy theirs, hearing news of our work through your friend may influence a person greater than seeing posts directly from our Twitter feed.

Below are examples of Twitter ‘mentions’ after our performance. If we were a real professional company these sort of public views published via social media would be invaluable, as if someone saw that this performance was extremely well received via Twitter, they may be more inclined to come and see a future one.

Facebook and Twitter have been hugely beneficial in our advertisement online, as a huge majority of the British population use these types of social media regularly, it would be foolish not to utilise them to push ticket sales to the maximum.

Works cited.

Carson, C. (2011) ‘Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation’ in Broadhurst, S. and Machon, J. (ed.) Performance and Technology, Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 181-193

Caitlin Clark

Our primary idea for both of our teaser trailers was very simple, yet extremely effective, resulting in an ambiguous yet intriguing video that will leave potential audiences wanting to attend our performance.

Below are stills from each trailer, and a link to the finished product via YouTube.

This was our first trailer. The trailer shows K sitting on a bench reading; throughout the trailer an image of a hangman drawn in chalk rapidly appears and disappears behind K. The flickering of the hangman is representative of K’s inner-thoughts. Whilst K tries to ignore these thoughts the flickering becomes more frequent and powerful, eventually remaining on the wall permanently. This suggests K’s mind has been completely succumbed to the thought of his impending fate. In the final shot of the video K looks directly at the camera, this shows the audience K has acknowledged the thoughts he was trying to repress, and he is no longer trying to fight them, in addition to this the final image creates a powerful ending to the short trailer to interest audiences. Following this final image details of STAMP Theatre’s performance appear as if written by a type writer, this keeps with the style of our performance.

This is our second trailer. we changed location for this video, however we kept the same style as previously stated. Joseph K simply standing up suggests that he is waiting for his approaching court case. Simultaneously, Joseph K checks the time on his watch whilst the image of the hangman appears on the brick wall, this signifies his conscious apprehension towards his mysterious trial.

The trailers were produced using editing software named Sony Vegas, I used two images to construct each trailer…

• The raw footage of Stuart either sitting on the bench reading or standing by the brick wall, and..
• A simple outline of a game of hangman in chalk – I downloaded a suitable Photoshop paintbrush to do this successfully.

I then layered these two images on top of each other and then edited the image to make the hangman picture flash on and off. Additionally, details of our performance then appeared at the end.

We have posted both of these trailers online via our company Facebook and Twitter profiles, this successfully spreads the news of our performance through the most popular medium, the internet. It is also currently being arranged that the second trailer will play on the television screens in the LPAC foyer, not only will this be played in the upcoming weeks of our performance, but prior to the actual performance on Friday 17th May.

Caitlin Clark

In April we began filming for STAMP Theatre’s first teaser video, the objective was a short trailer giving details of the performance date, whilst not revealing too much about our actual performance style, thus attracting audiences to our production. We wanted our trailer to be ambiguous but simultaneously put the audience in a position of uncertainty, mirroring exactly the position of Joseph K throughout our performance.

The concept of the video was extremely simple, but we believe the outcome will be very effective. Stuart, who plays the role of Joseph K, sat on a bench reading a newspaper for fifteen minutes, nothing changed in terms of camera angles or action. We also did this in another location where Stuart stood infront of a brick wall. We wanted our teaser video to show Joseph K in the most naturalistic sense, as throughout our production the grotesque and distorted phsyicality of the chorus contrasts against this.

The main and most interesting element of our teaser videos were attained through the editing process. We will to speed up the footage of Joseph K sitting/standing to roughly 10 seconds, suggesting hours of time has passed. On the brick wall behind him in both locations the outline of the children’s game ‘hangman’ will flash on and off, with Joseph K completing the image by being the hangman. We are aiming for this image to be particularly eerie, symbolising Joseph K’s mysterious trial looming over him as he attempts to carry on with his normal life. This is inspired by the Inspector’s slightly satircial line..

“You don’t understand, being arrested won’t interfere with you going about your every day life”.

We believe that this trailer will succeed in enticing audiences into questioning the relevance and inclusion of the game hangman, resulting in them wanting to attend our performance. This is precisely why we wanted our teaser video to be ambiguous, short and concise.

Here is a still image from our editing process and the final product.

Below is the risk assessment form previously filled out when renting out the camera equipment from LPAC. Please click to enlarge.

Caitlin Clark