Hello, I am Chantalle Cox, Assistant Producer for Light Night 2024 
I am a recent graduate from the University of Worcester, Drama and Performance and English Literature. My leading role within Severn Arts was to be the assistant producer for Light Night Worcester 2024. However, after expressing my interest in learning as much as possible i was also given the chance to work on marketing and communications for the event. Working on both has given me a broader experience and overview of how the event runs between the different departments. An experience I am  extremely grateful for, and hope will help develop my future working within the arts. 

What is Light Night?
Light Night returned for two evenings in February half-term with giant light-based artworks, colourful interactive installations, inspiring artistic commissions and entertaining walkabout artists, all highlighting their take on being connected.

Key Roles:

• Adding information to the website
• Creating social media posts and additional printed marketing material
• Creating artists packs
• Contacting artists for accommodation needs 
• Creating contracts and venue agreements 
• Visiting local businesses with letters and programmes 
• Supporting co-creation workshops
• Producing event signage and displaying in city 
• Supporting get-ins and outs of installations
• Creating impact and evaluation reports
• Creating environmental impact report

First Week: 
During my first week I mainly focused on familiarising myself with the Light Night project, funders, event safety and comms plan. In addition to this I attended my first Light Night production meeting where I met the team and the programme in its initial stages, where it was first explained to me. On my second day I took time out of the office and headed into the city center to walk the route that the team was working towards. This helped me to understand the programme better as i could visualize how it would work together across the city. I also researched other Light Night events such as the ones put on in Leeds and Durham to understand their marketing and think of new ways that we could promote our event. After this I collected information from the artists which would be used across our website, social media and on their artist panels for the night. 

Glowing and Growing with Baker and Bliss: 
In my second production meeting I was given tasks directly related to one installation, which would be my main focus on the production team, Glowing and Growing with Baker and Bliss.

These artists work with recycled materials; therefore, it was partially my job to find enough fabrics to transform the space and for  members of the public to work with during the workshops. This included writing a call out for the newsletter and visiting Worcester and Malvern charity shops for unsellable donations. In addition to this I worked closely with them during the set-up, which was an amazing opportunity to watch the space transform. I also attended their Saturday workshop, where they had 528 participants. During this workshop I had a chance to make a small piece to add to the instillation as well as adding my handprint to the wall of participants. It was great to see so many people attending and getting involved, especially whilst helping others to add their creating and watching the space grow throughout the days leading up to Light Night.   

Marketing: 
As an additional avenue to my role, I'm grateful that I was allowed to work on the marketing for Light Night as this was a branch i came to love and would like to explore further in the future. Some of the key areas to this were creating website pages, social media posts and additional printed material such as flyers and questionnaire postcards. My favourite part of this was working on the visual material such as the social media posts, posters and postcards. this gave me a creative outlet where I had the chance to design key templates for some of our marketing material.  

Production Week:
During this week my main focuses were putting out signage, setting up walkabout dressing rooms and helping with installation get-ins/outs. this was my favourite week of the internship as it was great to see all the installations finally taking place and the programme coming together. Also, whilst out in the city many members of the public were asking questions about the signage i was putting out, which gave me a chance to encourage them to pop back later and see Light Night, some being unaware it was happening prior to our conversations. On the two nights I was able to work across most of the programme, visiting different installations, chaperoning walkabouts and managing queues closers, all which gave me the chance to see the programme as a whole and experience Light Night for the first time myself. Overall, this was an amazing experience as I could see the impact the event had on the public and the joy and excitement it brought to local people by having something different on in the city, which brought life to what would have normally been a quiet night. 

Evaluation: 
The last few weeks of my internship were spent collecting feedback and surveys from the public, artists, volunteers and businesses. Part of this included looking at social media statistics, comments and posts as well as going around businesses and asking them to fill in a survey of feedback to understand the impact we had on them for the two nights. With all this information collected I then had to make an impact and evaluation report for us to give feedback on the success of the event. This was an insightful end to the project as I was able to learn what people like best about Light Night as well as understanding what developments we could work on for next time. In the final few days, I then started to explore research and development for Light Night, looking at potential works for future events and suggesting some works I might like to see myself.    

TOP TIP:
Invest in some comfy footwear, over production week I walked the same distance as climbing Mount Everest, base camp to peak!