superscreen for imag the stage/altar on the stage a conga line of pilgrims

Six weeks out the project manager for World Youth Day in Canberra resigned. With virtually nothing in place the organisers contacted VerveCreative, Alayne Taylor took on the task.

Now Alayne talks to ASE about the challenges of putting a WYD related event together a week before the Sydney party kicked off.

ASE:  What was your brief for the event?

Verve:  The brief was to manage every aspect of the festival on the 12^th July from the moment that people arrived in the vicinity of EPIC, so every logistical part of that.

ASE:  Can you explain how getting the gig came about.

Verve:  I got a phone call one afternoon asking for help and I asked if they could send us what they had and then if I could call back and see if we were able to do it.  So I got this email with three different documents which all were about a hundred pages each. 

I then spent two hours madly trying to figure out who everyone was, where it was, what they’d actually organised, where it was all at and what the job actually was about.  I actually couldn’t figure it out from these documents. 

So two hours later I rang back and just asked all the usual questions to get the brief from the client and where things were up to at that point.  And then I went away and worked out what we could and couldn’t help him with in the six week lead time. So we didn’t actually pick up Pilgrim transport because it was just something that we couldn’t help with and then we had several conversations over the weekend and then on Monday we were engaged and Tuesday we flew to Canberra and started working on the job.

ASE:  Your initial contact was with a committee essentially?

Verve:  No it was from an individual who was from one of the organisations within Canberra but which is governed by the World Youth Day Project Board for the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn and that Project Board is made up of lots of different organisations, heads of lots of different organisations within the Archdiocese.

ASE:  But then you pushed to make sure that you had one contact?

Verve:  Yep, so we had one contact on that Project Board who we dealt with directly on making decisions but anyone within his organisation we would also deal with directly on every day matters but we definitely had one point of contact.

ASE:  So essentially he was given the authority by that larger Body to deal with you and to make decisions?

Verve:  Correct.  And then he would report back each week on how we were progressing to his Board.

ASE:  With that lead time that you had, what was your approach as an event management company, what was your approach to ensure that you could pull it off in that time frame?

Verve:  Our first thing was to figure out who everyone was because down in Canberra in this organisation they had about 50 different people working on the event and we couldn’t quite figure out where things were up to and who everyone was. 

So I went down there and actually sat with each person and talked to them about their concerns and where they were up to.  And then from there we came back and structured the organisation the way that we needed to communicate with them and also gave them an overall strategy of what they wanted to get out of the event because they seemed very focussed on the actual day but not what happens beyond that for the actual Archdiocese.

ASE:  So do you have any involvement or did you submit any plan for any follow-up to the event?

Verve:  Only to do with what they could use after the event and how they could use elements that were created at the festival post-event.  So some of the banners that were created they can start using them post-event; and then some of the other parts where people did talks to try and create something that they can… their messaging allowed them to then engage people or contact people post-event.

ASE:  So you took over EPIC ( Exhibition Park in Canberra ) to stage an event for 10,000 people.

Can you just take us through the process, how many days out did you move in and what infrastructure were you responsible for putting in?

Verve:  We started bumping in on the Thursday, we had to bring in all the staging for the mass which was on the arena.  We also had to bring in staging equipment for three other stages, one being another outdoor stage.  There was all the toilets, the furniture, the banners, signage.

ASE:  What was actually involved in the festival on the day?  So there was a mass?

Verve:  The conclusion of the day was a mass, but during the day the pilgrims that had been sent to the Diocese as well as the locals from the Diocese came together and celebrated their faith in different parts, so there was an exhibition component. 

One of the pavilions was set up as an exhibition and that had about 100 exhibitors in it showcasing their different organisations; vocations, the different church groups that are around, planting trees at the Monastery, Right to Life groups etc and then there was a little stage in there for kids and face painting and singing and that.  And then there was a talks room where I think there were about five different talks during the day; and then in another pavilion there was another stage which had a café and sort of networking area for pilgrims to connect. 

And then outside on the forecourt there was another stage for different groups because the groups, each pilgrim group that came was actually responsible for doing an animation or a performance and that time had to be allocated for each group to be able to do that, and these all happened simultaneously and then at three o’clock there was the commissioning mass on the arena.

ASE:  Apart from people from within the Archdiocese of Canberra Goulburn there were also pilgrims from around the world involved as well?

Verve:  Canberra Goulburn actually billeted just over 5000 pilgrims in their area in that week prior to World Youth Day.  So all those pilgrims came along to the festival.

ASE:  Considering the short lead time what were your biggest challenges in trying to put this event together?

Verve:  The biggest challenge overall was initially figuring out who everyone was and what they were responsible for in the organisation.  But personally my biggest challenge was that I’m not Catholic and I had to get my head around all the different words, the new vocabulary that I wasn’t really aware of, get my mind out of corporate speak and into church speak.  So it was quite challenging for me.

ASE:  You didn’t have an interpreter?

Verve:  I almost needed one.  I asked lots of questions though.  I think they found it quite entertaining when I didn’t know what lots of things were.

ASE:  What sort of challenges were there sourcing equipment and so forth in such a short timeframe?

Verve:  Because there was only six weeks a lot of the equipment had already been sourced for World Youth Day in Sydney .  So most stuff had already been booked, we had to get bits and pieces some from Sydney some from Canberra all different places, particularly with furniture pieces, and get them and bring them to Canberra .

ASE:  What sort of advice would you have for anybody who was approached to do something like this?

Verve:  Just make sure that you’re prepared not to have a life for six weeks.  It was very stressful and pretty hard going.

ASE:  And how would you rate the success of the event then?

Verve:  I think the event was extremely successful.  It was a beautiful sunny day which was fantastic and…

ASE:  And your client?

Verve:  He is happy with the result.  He has been hard to contact though because he came straight to Sydney but the overall organisation was very happy with the way things went because they were very fearful that things weren’t going to work out with such a short lead time.

ASE:  So just going back to what you were saying about getting out of corporate speak and getting into Catholic speak, in terms of getting your head around that what’s different in terms the way you’re used to working to the way you had to work what did you have to change?

Verve:  I actually had to learn a lot of different Catholic parts.  I didn’t know what vestments were, I didn’t know how a mass worked, I didn’t know…

ASE:  But was there anything apart from just… like what I’m getting at is in terms of an event as a production, we have experiences where we work with corporates and we’ll work with community organisations…

Verve:  The big difference was that these people in this organisation are personally passionate about what they’re doing whereas in the corporate world people are passionate about it but it isn’t instilled in their soul.  So having an organisation where you have so many people personally connected to the event is the biggest challenge and making sure that when you’re talking about things a bit more sensitively than you do in the corporate world.  So there is that emotional attachment that they have.

ASE:  How did you staff the event?

Verve:  We had three people from Verve Creative.  We had one technical director and three stage managers.  And then we had staging crew on each stage also as they were hired for the day.

ASE:  And you were offered volunteers to help you out?

Verve:  We had different volunteers for different sections.  I think we had about 25 volunteers. I was managing those volunteers as well.  So there were the volunteers who we called zone managers so someone that was responsible for the talks and making sure the speaker got there, making sure that the performers turned up to the green room, the VIP manager, so they were the zone managers.  And then we had a hundred volunteers who were on the ground to help pilgrims, to answer questions, lead them in the right direction all that sort of stuff as well.

ASE:  There are a couple of other organisations that use EPIC to stage annual events, were you able to draw on their expertise?

Verve:  We did use the Traffic Management Plans from Summernats and we did use quite a few of the maps from the Folk Festival; but I have to say that unfortunately I didn’t get to speak to either of the organisations just due to the amount of time there was but we did definitely use their Traffic Management Plans because they’ve been going for years.

ASE:  ACT Police would have been primarily concerned with the traffic plans I would imagine.

Verve:  They were.  There was actually a lot of Government organisations involved in the planning because there was also do to with pilgrim health and then the transport and logistics of getting all these pilgrims to Sydney . And there were about 30 different ACT Government people.

So yeah there were lots of different departments because you also had different advisers to different Ministers within the Government also wanting to be involved and be advised of where things were up to as well.

ASE:  VIP services? I guess the Archbishop of Canberra Goulburn was essentially your VIP?

Verve:  Yes, along with some of the ambassadors from Canberra particularly from the more Catholic nations and some of the other Bishops visiting Australia .

ASE:  Security issues, did you have anything that you really had to deal with there?

Verve:  Not really, just making sure that there was security on site but there were actually no problems on the day which was fantastic.  I couldn’t have asked for a more delightful crowd and just lovely, truly lovely smiley happy people.

ASE:  Were they as happy clappy as what we saw in Sydney ?

Verve:  I didn’t quite see Sydney , I was away at the time, but they were super happy.  There were Congo lines and bush dances and a whole heap of different performances just happening impromptu in different areas of EPIC constantly, which was lovely because there were no dramas of people fighting or drinking or anything else going on.

ASE:  A bit of a contrast to Summernats.

Verve:  Yeah.  I don’t know but probably.

Production Credits

VerveCreative Team

• Alayne Taylor – Festival Manager
• Rob Frank – Staging and Production Manager
• Sophia Larroque – Exhibition Manager
• Sarah Harvey – Production Assistant

Suppliers

• HireAll -  trestle tables
• Canberra Hire - portaloos
• City Group - cleaning and waste removal
• Rocket Science Dept - Technical event & logistics management
• Nova Multimedia - Lighting & audio and crew for all stages
• Screencorp - Big screen
• Australian Temporary Fencing - Fencing & crowd barriers
• Kennards Hire - Structures, flooring & furniture hire
• GenPlus - Generator hire
• Butlers Hire - Mobile stage