| I’m *making* an online fundraising event for a school. I thought maybe people would gain something by seeing my process for creating, rehearsing, collaborating, and performing the event… So, here I am sharing. |
I really like spreadsheets for a lot of stuff. I’m not saying that I have the best way of doing this organization of a show flow, but here’s how I do it. All my crew is welcome to take notes however they like to get their work done, but I start out with a general show order so that I can plug things in and move things around. There are a lot of conversations that happen, but this gets them started.
Column A : time
not every row has a time. The times (like “8:15p”) are just there for important times. I don’t like when someone puts together a rough timeline and everything has an exact time. It will change a lot. This also prevents me from having to adjust every row when something new is added or edited.
Column B : general what
These are the simple descriptions of events that happen during the show like “intro the lion act” “opening monolog” “heartfelt speech”
Column C : duration
Rough estimates of how long things take help me understand the pacing and remind me to keep things short. “3min”
Column D : duration sums
This is the only spreadsheet formula so I can see how long the whole thing is running. Do I have too much content or too little? It adds the above some to the duration to the left. eg: the D4 cell says
“=(C4 + D3)”
Column E : notes to self
When I’m going thru, I this sheet, it’s nice to jot stuff down because I HAVE IMPORTANT THOUGHTS!
Column F thru Z : pieces needed
Each of these columns will have assets or things that I need from my people. So maybe column F is the “sound FX” column. Each moment in the show has its corresponding required sound effects next to it. This makes it easy for me to reconfigure the info later however i need to to talk to my sound effect person
This whole thing is messy.
Like I said, this is rough and it’s incomplete. It’s not a cue sheet or anything else like that. this is to get the whole production out of my head so that I start to visualize and use my brain for fleshing out, instead of doing the math and memorizing the order.