On the day of ‘The Shining’ event our team arrived at the venue early, we spent the time cropping and mounting photos, placing props, arranging furniture and setting up the lighting and sound. When all our extra staff arrived I held a quick meeting to go through how we wanted Hotel Staff to behave and what was expected of them. I showed everyone where they needed to stand and what time they should be in position by.

Myself and Flo created a document containing a character brief for the staff and a list of everyones duties which was circulated – Usher Roles 26.11.13.

Flo had the stressful job of artist liaison on the night, dealing with all the acts to make sure they where provided with everything they needed and received any drinks vouchers ect.

Everyone did their bit to make sure the night was a success and that the audience where taking in the full experience we provided. In one room we had actor Dannan McAleer playing the part of a crazy writer (Jack Torrence) as a theatrical installation, however the audience didn’t linger in this room as much as we had expected. To re-engage the audience with this element, and to draw the focus from the reader who was attracting more attention than they could handle, I encouraged Dannan to follow me into the main room and shout at me, which worked excellently.

After the film screening everyone made their way into the Watershed bar, which had ben decorated during the film. We had offered the free service of a cloakroom which required people to collect their belongings, but also ensure they stuck around to see the slow, strange, dancers perform to Al Bowlley’s ‘The Midnight Stars and You’, and have one or two more drinks.

The Online response was great, I put together a Storyfy page to collate some of them, which can be seen here : http://storify.com/ZoeHornHaywood/the-corridor-sessions-presents-the-shining

We also received excellent feedback from the Watershed Analytics team, who processed all the feedback forms. The majority of it was positive, with a few ideas of how things could be improved, such as extra bar staff and more promotion about the pre-movie entertainment.

What I learnt from this feedback, is that although we did bring in a new audience it only equated to 14% of our guests, and that only 22% of the audience where aged between 18-24, so although we managed to bring in a small amount of our target audience, it wasn’t very substantial. However on the plus side 83% of people had a ‘brilliant time’ and 14% a ‘good time’. From picking out key words from the comments I can tell, we achieved our plans of trying to entertain people whilst scaring them a bit with our gothic theme. We also picked the correct film to ensure a packed house, and we can tell that there is strong encouragement for the Watershed to do similar things in the future.