It has been two and a half weeks, and I feel so much more confident with public speaking, we’ve been given some priceless advice by some really inspiring producers, and we’re starting to whittle our MASSIVE theme into something more tangible, quickly getting an idea for how our Fun Palaces weekend might pan out.

The weekend before last, we had a public speaking workshop which really helped me out in terms of structuring a presentation, enabling me to put the paper down and speak as though I were having a conversation. I’ve really struggled with this before, as my writing style is so different from the way I speak, so if I’m reading from a sheet I feel very nervous and unnatural and start to panic (resulting in nonsensical gibbering and a shaky face). Bearing everything I’d learnt in mind when pitching to a panel of producers at the end of the second weekend, I felt – for the first time in my life – like I was actually handling a public speaking scenario with a certain degree of confidence! I never thought that would happen…

The presentations and post-talk chats we have had with various amazing producers have been consoling, inspiring, and full of useful words of warning, which will no doubt be incredibly useful to us as our projects take shape. One of the most important pieces of advice we were given, which seems obvious, but looks to be easily forgettable when you’re right in the middle of an intense project, is to never forget your audience, and to consider the ‘user journey’ at all times. I really love this… No one told us about this shit at art school! Fun Palaces is going to be such a massive learning curve in terms of audience consideration, and encouraging people to get into the spirit of sci-fi even if they’re not a massive fan.

It’s so brilliant to be learning so much alongside such an amazing cohort of people. Our team’s enthusiasm for Fun Palaces, sci-fi and everything we’re looking into is growing by the session. After our first Wednesday evening meet up, I think we’ve realised what a huge subject we’re dealing with. As it stands, our themes to help with idea generation and curating events are: The Future (everything in the future) Space (everything in the universe) and fiction (anything and everything)… It’s like trying to curate infinity! It’ll be really interesting to see how we narrow things down and start to come to some more concrete decisions.