From The Morgue

On the scene now in Wellington: glossy, sexy brochures for The Affair of the Diamond Necklace, the interactive theatre event I wrote for the St James Theatre here in Dubtown. It’s a full-colour piece of eye candy that really makes the show look awesome – which is as it should be, because the show will be awesome.
There’s something very exciting about having classy collateral showcasing your wares. It makes the whole endeavour feel suddenly real, which is an important effect when the experience from this side of the coin is people in a room having fun and emails going back and forth about costumes and script edits. It’s like a feedback loop – we put something out there that announces us in a big way, and then we get extra movitation to live up to that high standard.
It has not escaped my notice that this is, by coincidence, ten years exactly since I was last distributing glossy, sexy brochures around Wellington in order to promote an interactive theatre event. That was Apocalypse, also called Aliens: Apocalypse (but not on the official literature so we didn’t violate any copyrights). Apocalypse was the last of three biannual weekend events where a big crowd of people pit themselves against the Giger-creatures of the Alien movie series. I was the prime mover behind all three, but was far from alone. They were all successful, but this third one, Apocalypse, was the most fitful and compromised success. It was, to be plain, an over-reach not in scale of event but in the content – I was trying to do with it something that I didn’t have tools to do. These days, with a vibrant live action gaming scene in New Zealand, with alternate structures for interactive gaming like Jeepform, online RP, pervasive games and the technique-focused Forge diaspora, and with just more know-how under our collective belts, it is safe to say we would have done it differently. But still: a success, a memorable occasion.
The flyers were beautiful but ultimately fruitless. A careful media strategy saw us garner coverage in newspapers and radio; we were supported by a handsome website and these impressive flyers completed the image of an interesting and well-assembled event. From all of these efforts, we pulled in only a handful of people who didn’t come from word-of-mouth. (On the other hand, these few people were also enthusiastic supporters of the event, and we benefited from their presence greatly; so perhaps it did balance out in the end?)
And again, I think back to the second Aliens weekend, Fury, and how every person who arrived encountered a huge and impressive movie-style poster dramatising the event they were about to join. Those posters, I’m convinced, set the tone; they told every participant that this was something big, something special. And so they believed, and so they acted, and so it was.
But then again, I remember walking the dealers room at Gen Con 2005 and seeing the people sitting lonely in their booths, surrounded by product they would never shift, with incredible art on the cover of their piled hardbacks, art that would have cost a fortune. The magic didn’t work with that transaction.
I’m excited that people will be picking up our brochure and stuffing it into their jacket pocket and pulling it out later on as they walk along the waterfront and inspecting it, decoding it, evaluating it. The glossy brochure is a promise; it says that we’re delivering something worth your time. I am deeply confident that we are doing exactly that.