The Young Producers programme is all about supporting young people to curate a live music event to showcase young artists; the project was forced to take a hiatus in 2020 for obvious reasons – so we’re doubly excited to introduce our 2021 Young Producers: Demi, Mariana and Marleigh.
Join us at 7pm on Thursday 2nd December for their event ‘Crossroads’ at beautiful music venue The Old Church (Stoke Newington, N16 9ES).
The event is FREE but please RSVP to projects@irenetaylortrust.com so we have an idea of expected numbers.
The Young Producers have jointly put together a blog below about their experiences so far…
Initially, Marleigh had a lot of different expectations for the project. He was surprised to find that the venue was already booked, but was thankful for the support and was looking forward to branching out his skills, always looking to develop himself as an artist and music producer.
Demi was excited about learning more of the marketing side of things and gaining experience to apply to her career as a DJ.
Session 1
The first session took place online, a first time for the Young Producers scheme, and was focused on creating an event initial idea and understanding the event timeline and our roles. After meeting everyone, we played an icebreaker exercise in which we were given a secret themed event which the other Young Producers had to guess from asking questions. We had to think about the target audience, location, venue, lighting, music, seating plan and more to work it out.
The morning of the session ended with a talk from freelance producer Marie.
Demi: “I’ve met Marie before on Making Tracks, she’s really cool and gives really good advice as a freelance producer.”
We also decided our roles in the group. There’s an Artistic Producer, a Communications producer and an operation producer in our team; we have all been working together and merging ideas but also have our own responsibilities to develop the project.
The rest of the session was focused on researching our ideas and presenting them to the group, sourcing images, fonts and text that inspired us. We created a mind map of initial ideas to work with and drew connections between what we brought.
Marleigh: “I realised from the session that there’s a lot of things I don’t know, but was looking forward to learning more.”
It was very different and challenging to not be in the same room when starting this project, when you’re not there in the space with other creatives it is definitely a different atmosphere, but we were still able to showcase our ideas to the group and start the process of creating a theme for our event.
Session 2
The second session was all about creating the event flyer and learning more about how to market and develop the brand of an event. When discussing our initial ideas from session 1, we decided to ask the group “What’s important to you in your life?” and started from there.
We found that our thoughts related really well and started to focus on the idea of ‘road to self-discovery’. Marleigh shared with the other Young Producers that this reminded him of Big Zuu’s album cover for Navigate, and that it shared a lot of common themes. From this, we found our imagery for the event of roads, signs and streets to relate to the idea of finding your own path, and came up with the event name: Crossroads.
Marleigh: “It felt like a bit of a rollercoaster, and at times proper stressful. As ideas were flying around it felt uncertain, but when the drafts of the flyers began being sent through by Demi the theme really started to come together.”
Mariana: “The last two sessions have been really informative and really helpful as I understood more about creating and putting up an event. We looked at social media, creating a theme and event marketing.”
Session 3
Today was our third session of the Young Producers programme; so far we have down our ideas for the theme, the venue where the performance will take place and we’ve also created our flyer that will promote the event on social media.
We went to visit the venue and we had to think and decide where the audience will be and where the artists are going to be performing. We also had to think about any restrictions that may be in place, if we wanted to include refreshments, capacity considerations and any creative ideas for the background and stage setting.
There’s more work to be done and we’ll give you an update on how things are going.
Don’t forget to RSVP for the performance! projects@irenetaylortrust.com
The Young Producers Team
Making Tracks 
