My Budget For A Production

For my performance I decided to use the show Electra. This play I have a lot of knowledge about as i have researched it thoroughly and i would know exactly how i would conduct it.

For starters I chose the Sealight Theatre as my choice of theatre, this meant that i would get it at a discounted rate. All the actors and Actresses within this production of Electra would be performed by college students so it would be funding inkind.

After then laying out what i would need to set up a production i did research into each one about how much it would all cost and where would be the cheapest place to go.
For the ticket sales I wanted to make them realistic prices but also the capacity of our theatre is 90 seats so i needed to take that into account and how many people would turn up, as i cant assume that it will be 100% ticket sales.I worked out this price by logically thinking about how much a college play would sell their tickets at.

I looked at the Worthing Tavana which is a greek restaurant in Worthing and for a half page sponsor advert in our programme i settled a price with them for £30, they said this is about right for this type of advertising and they said if this were a real production this is what they would do.

I didn't want to just have programmes for sale as i know that in house merchandise and drink stalls make good money.
So i decided that you could buy drinks and crisps before the show or in the interval this would cost £5 for 1 bottle of white wine and you can get 5 glasses out of 1 bottle so assuming that 10 people bought a glass of wine costing at £2 i would make a profit of £10. All this i believe adds to having an entrepreneur mindset in wanting to achieve good profit margins.
For the Orange Juice i decided to make them good and affordable especially for children. I made it 40p a glass as this would still allow you to make profit. Each carton of juice costs 75p and i did the same you could get 5 glasses out of this so if i sold 25 glasses of orange juice which is what i would expect as 35 students and children were estimated to attend making a total of £5.75.
Crisps i could buy in at 60p each which meant we would only be making a 10p profit per bag we sold, assuming i sell 20 packets i only make £2.

For the programme i have good photoshop skills so would create them myself and by doing this it meant i could get them with a professional look at get 50 printed at a cost of £16.99, this was an excellent price and i got this off of Vista Print.

This allowed me to make a total of £817 this is without the expenditure of the food and drinks. The Net total for my income is £762.75.

My discounted rate venue hire would only cost £100 and this is where i saved the most money within the whole production.
As i decided to do the production Electra this meant i could get an online copy for free as the playwright has no copyright issues.

My publicity total was £19.49, i spent this on posters and flyers. The posters would cost £11.40 this would have cost £32.40 if i got them done online and professionally, but with my photoshop skills i would design the poster myself however the £11.40 would cover my printing ink and poster paper costs. Which just goes to show if you can and have the skills to do it yourself it can cost more than half the price.
The other percentage of money that got spent in publicity was on flyers. For 25 flyers it cost £8.09 this figure i also got on VistaPrint.

The sets and props would be made on site with college resources that was all funding inkind. However, in Electra the only staging that was needed is a staging that is provided with the theatre and the only prop used is a door frame which could be found for free off GumTree or Freecycle, that is if the sealight theatre didn't have one, luckily however they do.

The lights usually would also come with the Sealight Theatre, however i made room for error so i also looked up how much it would cost to hire the lighting from somewhere else. I found off West Sussex Lighting And Party Hire, that i could hire 10 main lights with colour filters at a renting cost for £40 this is for 2 days, which would last us the 2 performances. However, this is included with the cost of the Sealight Theatre so that £40 wouldn't necessarily be needed.

Costumes will mainly be provided by actors as it is a basic costume, however i left £25 as 4 sets of black wings were purchased off of eBay at the price of £4 each this comes to a total of £16 for the wings leaving us £9 for other bits and bobs if needed. The make-up would be provided by actors and put on by actors.

The programme printing i got off vistapint this was for 25 of them which was fine as we estimated to only sell 20, this cost £16.99 which i believed to be reasonable. I left £50 emergency money in case not all went to plan and i needed to invest more money in certain areas.

However, this left me with a total profit of £751.27 after all my costs were added up.