bestival 2007 planning

We're camping here - top left hand corner of Green Campsite no 3:


and I'm going to deploy this flag, up a 5 meter flagpole, to mark our camp:


On Saturday, we're going to dress as bees and meet at 2:45 at the big top, to swarm somewhere. The more bees, the better. The rest of the time, I'll be dressed as an illuminated jellyfish, so please come say hi.

Afterthought - are there any other communications planners/marketing strategists going to this festival? There's already Faris, Asi and I'm also going in a car with 2 other planners...

monster pro wrestling: kaiju big battel (sic)

photo from varmazis

This is the most fantastically silly thing I've heard about for ages. Essentially, men in Godzilla and Ultraman (70's Japanese rubber suit monster movies) do pro wrestling, but with added props, such as cardboard cities to destroy.

Here's a highlight reel of a Brooklyn event:

link to youtube

I'm utterly enthralled, and with my new found unemployment, I'm keen to get an event (albeit a very small one) going in the UK. It's another great example of the mix of film, entertainment and sport that's springing up at a grassroots level all over the world - it's the kind of thing brands should be doing, rather than paying people to find out about and copy.

I find it a fantastic mix of cultures, from US pro wrestling, Japanese Monster movies, and I think it would fit really nicely with the whole England summer festival vibe - perhaps first demo bout at Bestival this year?

If you'd like to help organise an event, please get in touch. We need:

Atheletes - people with wrestling, MMA, martial arts or gymnastics backgrounds, but most of all with a love of pro wrestling.

Costume and prop builders - balsa wood, pvc, theatre costumes, ring builders, all sorts

Creatives - with an interest in the genre to help with character concepts, storylines and general shenanigans.

Enthusiasts - anyone from ring girls, to spectators, to just helping out.


Please get in touch if you're interested, or pass on to people you think might dig this kind of silliness. We'll be starting low key - think 4 atheletes and simple rope ring with mats and a cardboard London Eye and Big Ben to destroy.

Remember, Tokyo wasn't destroyed by monsters in a day!

think local, act like you're at a festival - house party 2.0

Edit - so, evidently, I'm not able to make this happen. I am totally stoked that it's a good idea, and I'm going to try again next year.

Ok, here's an idea to run by you. It's essentially a festival made up of house parties, lasting for 4 days - Friday through til Monday, with the capacity for about 100-150 people.



Here's how it'll work:

Designate 4-5 mates' houses, all around Victoria Park, about 20-30 minutes walk apart from each other.

Each house is decked out like for a house party, but with an important difference - there is a designated sleeping area (e.g. tents out back or a few airbeds on the top floor, etc) and there is a designated food area (kitchen with some soup and bread).

The festival starts on Friday at noon. Get some clothes, maybe a sleeping bag in a pack, go to the main house, get your wristband. Woohoo! Festival time!

Rule 1: No going home until you leave the festival! Even if you live a couple of tube stops away!

Each of the 4 houses will be manned in some capacity for the whole festival.

Each night one of the houses will have a totally sick party, and one of the houses will have a chilled party e.g. acoustic gig.

If you want neither, you can go to one of the other 2 remaining houses, where people will be monging around in small numbers. You could shower,or perhaps have an early night.

That's it. Consider this the first pass at a manifesto for "urban fest summer 2007", or whatever it's called:

1. Re-imagine your home and local life as places where routine and drudgery aren't compulsary. This is important, because otherwise we start believing that home is boring and we have to spend money in flash clubs or go far away in order to have any real memorable fun.

2. If you think you're in a festival, if you're always within 20 minutes walk across the grass from somewhere with dancing, if you're surrounded by like-minded happy people with nothing to do, and no home for the next 3 days, then you ARE in a festival.

3. You don't have to have a loaded posh cousin with farmland to start your own festival. Yay!

We could theme the festival however we wanted - fancy dress like Bestival, or different themes for different houses - I have some ideas here.

What do you reckon guys? Up for it? I volounteer my house first, and put forward the August Bank Holiday weekend as a tentative date.

zoltar fortune telling costume

Ages ago I posted about halloween costumes. I got my first useful comment on this blog - I had drawn a couple of sketches of an arcade machine costume, and a guy had replied:

The Arcade machine is a killer idea. I may just have to import that one to the states. I was thinking maybe a "Zoltar" fortune telling machine like from that Tom Hanks movie "Big"

That is why blogging and the Internet are so good.

So anyway this story is about my costume for Bestival 2006, a big music and fancy dress festival on the Isle of Wight. The agency I work for was taking us there for our annual summer party.

My costume choices were:

• UPS delivery guy(s)
• Putting a microwave on head
• With 2 other mates as the crow, kid, and dog from the Kia Ora advert (80's kids TV)
• A big cardbox box on you to make you a 'white good' of some kind, e.g. washing machine, fridge. I thought this would be cute as you would end up looking and walking like the milk carton in Blur's Coffee and TV. I just had a thought i would be cool to get a couple of mates as other appliances and you could all just make a kitchen together.
  

• Zoltar Fortune telling machine from the movie 'Big'
• With 2 other people as a dog show. I can't remember how this would work exactly, but 1 or 2 people would be obstacles like poles or the cloth tunnel, and another guy would be a crufts judge with a table, trophy and scorecards. We would then have a dog outfit which we would give to people and the handler would take them round our 'course'. Hmm.
• the Alessi knife rack that looks like a person
  

In the end the UPS idea won out - because it was easy, quick and is quite a fun thing to go round as - you can talk to a lot of people. The most fun about making it (aside from the fact that I got ANOTHER boiler suit! yay!) was making the tape stripes out of silver duct tape with yellow insulating tape on it.

L to R: Stuart and me. PACKAGE COMING THROUGH!

But I was still nagged that I really wanted to build Zoltar. It looked a bit impossible given the fact that I only had 2 nights to do it, but when I saw a perfect sized cardboard box outside work, I knew I had to try. So off I pedalled to B&Q (like Home Depot).

Zoltar Shopping List: you will need

• A big cardboard box - the base of the outfit
• PVC plumbling pipes about 30mm diameter - they form the struts and the internal frame
• Loads of duct tape
• Paint and decoration for the outside of the box
• Material for little curtains
• Mystic waistcoat of some kind
• bit of bedsheet for turban
• Crystal ball

Essentially, it's just a box, with a frame of PVC pipes that enable the 4 tall vertical pipes to hold the top of the machine. The only tricky thing was that I was going to have to be able to assemble the entire rig at the festival, using minimal (just duct tape and a knife), as it wouldn't fit in the bus we were going in.

The frame was put together first, using trial-and-error and a hacksaw to cut the pipes to the right size, and just taping the joints together using duct tape. I knew i was going to have to dismantle this, so I just used one bit of tape, and labelled every pole and joint. This took about one and a half hours.

Once I had built the frame, and then squeezed it into the box, I was really surpised at how strong it was, and knew I wouldn't have any worries about needing more bits of frame. It was still a bit flexy laterally, but with the box flaps taped down, things were super strong.

Then all that was left to do was attach the header card to the top poles, which i did just using duct tape.

This is where I ended up at about 1am - a ready to decorate Zoltar box!

Stage 2: Decorating Zoltar

As much as I could work out from the Internet, the Zoltar in Big looks a bit like this:

I could have gone for an uber-realistic effect, but the actual Zoltar isn't visually that striking. Aside from the fact it's a guy in a turban in a box, there aren't any strong visual clues to copy. Vic, who'd arrived with with a load of paints, material and glitter went with a panto-esque, friendly, lo-fi approach, which worked beautifully.

We worked til about 10pm and then packed it in. The next day I got up really early, pulled the whole thing apart, stuffed the cardboard in a bin bag, taped all the poles together, and got on the number 8 to work.

So, on arrival at the festival, me and stuart changed into UPS outifts and spent a pleasant evening delivering packages to people.

The next day I woke up, chilled for a bit and got Ed of whatwhat to help me put Zoltar together. I also made him draw me some signs, which we glued onto Zoltar, just in case anyone couldn't work out what was going on.

The next step involved taping curtains to the box, and hanging up the grotty-but-fab mirrorball, which would enable me to see into people's disco futures. By this stage things were looking good, and the sunshine was out.

The masking tape is just to hold the HE SPEAEKS YOUR FUTURE sign in place until the copydex dries.

rear view

I then packed some glowsticks and flashy LED rubber things, duct tape, a Stanley knife (box cutter), and some marker pens into a bag and set off into the madness. Met up with the gang but still wasn't feeling very Zoltar-like.

But then when we hit the main parade, I was inspired by all the other costumes. Some were very creative, some very professional and some just plain funny.

Lego guy costume

Box jellyfish head guy costume (my personal fave)

As well as a lot of shouts of "CAN YOU MAKE ME BIG!?", I was getting a lot of people come up to me and ask for their fortune to be read. About 50% of them would present me with their palms too. At first this threw me a little, but I got steadily better and sleazier as the day went on.

fortune: many people will stare at your chest, and your self-esteem will rise, then fall

The box really isn't very heavy and I could easily lug it around all day. Which I did, getting more and more drunk, until nightfall.

I then ended up in the dance tent, and decided to stick these horrible flashing LED lights and glowsticks all over the box. This turned out to be a dreadful idea as they kind of blinded and confused me as the night wore on. It was a huge attention grabber though.

It was definitely the most fun fancy dress I've ever made or worn. There are loads of pics here on my Flickr.

I'm going to try and add more to this post when I get a chance.

technorati tags:fancy, dress, bestival, 2006, costume, zoltar, tom, hanks, big, movie, fortune, teller