Ready and rearing to go.

Mary and I met at a convention years ago. More recently we both worked with our financial partner to create a new event. If you didn’t read Part One, CLICK HERE.  If you didn’t read Part TWO, CLICK HERE. 

The perfect event setup.

The Bruce Festival seemed like the perfect arrangement. Two passionate and experienced content creators cut loose, backed by a wealthy sponsor with a personal investment, co-creating a fused vision. A shared experience which we were all deeply emotionally invested in.

Our financial partner, John, did a great job of promoting the event and recruiting volunteers for Mary to work with.  John has a wonderful enthusiasm for whatever he is working on.

Mary worked on the event almost every day for eight weeks, often working over ten hours a day and in the week of the event working twelve and thirteen hours days (all while juggling a 12 month old). James also had a similar routine with the exception of time taken to storyboard a Trump campaign commercial near the beginning of this period. This was necessary to fund our time waiting for The Bruce Festival finances to catch up to the labor, which took a long time but did eventually happen.

A whole gaggle of Scots

I am descended from my namesake McFarland clan, while Mary is a formal Scottish Lady, Lady Mary McFarland of Chaol Ghleann ( “s-hool-huloh” ). She can dance an Irish jig with grace, and performed one at our wedding and on our honeymoon.  She cut the cake at our wedding with a Scottish replica sword. For my sixteenth birthday I bought myself a Scottish dirk, a knife which I still maintain as part of my knife collection.

John was on a mission to learn about his family history.  In Scotland, John lucked in to seeing a gathering in a park.  He came back and contacted me immediately because he was thinking about holding a barbeque party at his home and wanted my help producing a travelogue video and a poster to share with friends.  I suggested we rent a venue and hire Mary to create an event.

 He had discovered that it was the 750th birthday of a Scottish figure and wanted to capitalize on that momentous fact.  I shared with him my history of 16 years involvement with large conventions, and that of my wife who helped create and administratively run multiple shows and corporate events over the years.  I had been providing consulting to John in the three years prior to the event helping him redefine his small town messaging.

Mary and I set to work immediately.  She took off time from other clients and spent two full months working 10-14 hour days for John.  Mary created the sponsorship structure and goals. She produced a lot of internal organization material.  She also handled all of the PR and press releases for the event, contacting all of the local papers and event publications.

We poured our hearts and labor into building the event. For two grueling, poverty-inducing months we ate, breathed, and dreamed The Bruce Festival into existence.  This was a massive labor of love, as we were falling farther and farther behind on our own needs through the process.  (Looking at the map below, I just remembered how much effort I went to in order to put our vendors in the shady areas, lol, I worked from satellite imagery of the tree shade).

Production continues

John was responsive to our goals and general event requirements.  Whenever we foresaw a need or a new way to expand the concept, we would relay our goal to him and he would make the call and foot the bill. 

As the weeks progressed, Mary and I built-out and ideated the core of the event.  We used our years of experience to create the kind of event we would love to see.  I suggested the name “BruceFest” and our web designer countered back with “The Bruce Festival.”  I had the vision of an axe as the primary design element, an idea which was rejected, but it was the right call.

Working remotely became nearly impossible.  I was asked to walk away from my workstation regularly to travel and consult in-person. This task would cost me eight to ten hours of labor every time I undertook it, uncompensated.  During this time I was separated from my highway car leading to runaway fuel costs, around a thousand dollars of gas which could have been avoided.  Nobody likes begging for cash scraps just to fill the tank and make it back home again.

INSTALLATION ART

I came up with and designed a huge amount of visual art content, and truly invested my heart and soul into a series of large installation masterpieces.  There was little content prepared for me in this regard, and I handled the majority of content creation.  John was able to provide some genealogical material to demonstrate his family history.  I had to prompt a little to receive some of the essential details for section of the art installment. 

 Our financial partner desired to spotlight the Flemings but missed all the deadlines I had set to submit content for production.  (below: the content gaps existing at the cutoff date:  these were REALLY BIG installation pieces and needed a lot of content)

There was a translation of the Declaration of Arbroath which our partner preferred.  He wanted to selectively pull a few phrases out of it, but I was dedicated to making it all work.  So, I highlighted the excerpts he wanted to see.  From a design perspective this is a masterwork which I am greatly pleased with.

There was a brief anecdote about a spider and a brief anecdote about a fisherman.  There were general topics, families and historical periods or events he wanted highlighted, but with no content or details.  Having nothing to go on and needed to build it all from scratch was GREAT because it allowed me to strongly craft a unified historical narrative and visual immersion to my heart’s desire.  I had a blank canvas to work with.  I went back to the drawing board and started completely fresh and constructive.

John first saw these during a dark night by the light of a candle when the power was out.  Is that cool or what?