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Make business cards! These are really easy to hand out, and you can use them to advertise both the Ensemble as a whole (be sure to include our address, ensemble.mit.edu) as well as any REX or CPW events that may be upcoming. You can get them printed at CopyTech at a convenient time and location for a convenient price. Note that their online order form is a little misleading; just be sure to make ample use of the comments section (the people at CopyTech are really nice!). Here are some cards we've used in past years.
During the fall, bring advertisements for upcoming auditions!
Set up an interest form, and bring laptops so that people can fill it out! During REX, include a poll so that prefrosh can vote for their favorite title. (In fact, it may be wise to advertise the form as "Help pick our title for the 24 Hour Show!" before it is revealed to them that the form they are filling out is actually an interest form.) The form might look something like this. Afterward, remember to go back and collect the emails to put on an Ensemble interest list. Interest lists from each year live in ensemble-interest@; add emails from the specific year to ensemble-interest-[year]@ (if this does not yet exist, make it!) and ensure that ensemble-interest-[year]@ is added to ensemble-interest@. (Remember to make ensemble-request@ the owner of any list you make!). During REX, make a note of the people interested in helping out with tech; see #11 in the 24 Hour Show section below.
During the fall, bring advertisements for upcoming auditions! Additionally, you can pull up the audition form on a laptop so that prefrosh can sign up for an audition slot right there and then.
Bring silly hats! It's traditional.
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- Pick a time and reserve a room. You’ll need a room reserved for an entire Saturday. In the past we have had 24 Hour Shows at 6-120 and 4-270, depending on room availability. Any similarly sized lecture hall will do.
- Announce the show. Email out to ensemble@, ensemble-dartes@, and if you so choose the mailing list for the current show to tell everyone that a 24 Hour Show is happening. State where and when it will be. Remind everyone that there will be a mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm the Friday before in the Office, and that actors will be expected at 8am the next day.
- Shortly after your announcement, begin an email thread for title nominations! Simply ask folks to reply-all with their suggestions. Remind people not to discuss the plot associated with any particular title, or else the title will be immediately disqualified. At this stage, you should encourage people to send in as many suggestions as possible! This usually isn’t too difficult, as members tend to get very excited about 24 Hour Shows. Keep up the hype, and the suggestions will start streaming in.
- Close title nominations after about a week or so, and compile all the suggestions into a single form you’ll be sending out for approval voting. You may wish to clean up the titles a little for capitalization, obvious spelling errors, etc., or you can leave titles as they are—up to you! Remember to ask for people’s names, and use checkboxes to allow for approval votes. Email out the form in a new thread (people are bound to have started ignoring the title nomination thread by now) and invite all members and Dartes to vote for any titles they like.
- At the same time, send out a general interest form to get a sense of how many actors and tech ninjas you’ll have. The form will be non-binding—after all, you can’t really know if you’re going to be working on the 24 Hour Show until 24 hours before the 24 Hour Show! So it can help to ask people to give an estimate of the probability that they’ll actually be available. Writers must be available Friday night; actors and the director should be available all day Saturday; everyone else helping will be needed Saturday afternoon. It is vehemently suggested that writers, actors, and the director are all different people. See below for a list of people you’ll need and tasks they’ll need to complete. Here’s a sample interest form.
- Over the next week or so, based on the results of the interest form that are coming in, you’ll be able to gauge which roles won’t be hard to fill and which roles might be a little more troublesome. This is where you may need to nudge people individually to see if you can’t persuade them to fill out the roles you’re still looking for.
- Close title approval voting a week or so after it gets sent out, and compile the top ten or so titles. The exact number of titles you’ll keep in contention is up to your discretion. Then prepare a form for the final vote. During REX, as mentioned previously, you’ll open up the title voting to the prefrosh! During IAP, title voting will remain within the Ensemble, but this means you can choose to employ a fancier voting method like ranked choice—still, however you want to count votes is up to you.
- A couple days before the show, send out dormspam announcing the show to the general public! If you’ve never sent dormspam on behalf of the Ensemble before, be sure to check in with someone who has. Here’s a sample; note the copious amounts of question marks.
- Hold the mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm Friday night before the show in the office! Be sure to send out a reminder to the Ensemble a few days beforehand that attendance to this meeting is mandatory for anyone involved, barring extraordinary circumstances. This is where you’ll announce the title (be sure to have it decided, or at least narrowed down to a couple of options, beforehand). If for whatever reason you can’t decide whether to allow one title or another from the election results, feel free to hold a vote amongst the people who show up to the kickoff meeting.
- Now get everyone to commit to either acting, writing, directing, or doing tech. Pass around a spreadsheet like this one for everyone to fill out, and share it with the director/producer. Check in with the director/producer to make sure they know what needs to happen (see below). Remind writers to include a suggested props and costumes list as well as notes on double-casting and such. Remind actors that they should get a good night’s sleep and meet at the performance space at 8am the next morning. Then off they’ll go!
- During the REX 24 Hour Show, invite prefrosh who filled out the interest form at Activities Midway saying they were interested in tech to come help out with the show! It can be especially cool if prefrosh can help out with lights; unfortunately, CAC now requires us to submit a plan in advance if we wish to have lighting equipment in classrooms. Still, it may be useful to look into this.
Here’s Here’s a list of people you’ll need for a 24 Hour Show:
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- Make or gather props, set pieces, costume pieces, etc.
- Prepare and run sound cues, if necessary
- Set up lighting equipment, if necessary
- Design a show image (for posters and dormspam)
- Send out dormspam
- Print and hang posters
- Design programs (you may wish to look over these to ensure they contain a blurb about the Ensemble and a link to our website)
- Print and fold programs
- Pass out programs at the door
- FILM THE SHOW
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