Gitart and yesterday workshop

Yesterday Rookie went on the workshop about the sound and light equipment for events. It was very short but informative. We learned how to roll the wires, that microphones have to be packed up first, that amplifiers have to be switched on last and switched off first, that to escape horrible high pitch sounds microphones have to be kept away from the speakers and that it's better to get many people to arrange the stage and live performance and pack up, because the equipment is normally heavy enough to be lifted by few.
Today InRecords made graphics and prints for the guitar that is going to be a tangible representation of our business ideas. The guitar is going to be covered with images of the event content, sponsors and will show how big the crowd will be there. Moreover, we are improving our communication plan especially one addressed to amateur musicians, who are one of our main targets. We are in the process of clearing up the media partners, arranging grants and looking for alternative money resources. Probably tomorrow we will have first meeting with our client. It is getting more close to the actual production phase!


by Yana Kovtun,
Creative Manager.

Working In The Sun

Yesterday, tuesday the 23th of march, we had quite a list of things that we wanted to do. We have made draft letters for all parties we might want to contact in the near future. So we made seperate letters for companies, schools and people that we would like to have for a workshop or presentation.

Also, we have started preparing our meeting with Robin Lemmers, the owner of muzyQ. We think it is best to have short pitch, with an extra twist to it. We will tell you more about this at a later stage.

We have started contacting some people as well, and by calling the people we have collected some direct e-mail adresses. This way the mails will get to the right people straight away. We are also happy announce that Creative Commons has shown interest in our concept, although more information is needed beforehand of course.

One of those things is the date, something we have been thinking about already of course, but we would first like to muzyQ, to find out what their preference might be. Within our group, we we're thinking of the start of June on a weekday. This way we can attract students, and be ahead of the World Cup madness which will start on the 10th of June with the opening ceremony.

We have a lot to do today as well, so I will get back to work asap. Sorry for the delay, but we we're working a bit longer than expected yesterday. I hope it is going to be a little bit less warm compared to yesterday in our green-house office.

Keep reading,

David

Monday...

Monday again. Almost the end of the day and we still have a lot of work to do for the rest of the week. We are going to have a couple of meetings with our coaches this week and of course the deadline of our project plan is this Thursday! Our flash presentation turned out great and we hope it will be appreciated by our client as well.

We just had a meeting with Annelies, Kwela and the MT. They were surprised we didn’t make any contact with people who we want to give workshops yet. I don’t feel that we have a real reason why we didn’t but we will get on it as soon as possible. I hope no one got the impression that we have been slacking last week because we actually were very busy.

Hope to get contacts very soon so the next time, in a meeting, we can present more detailed information about our project.

p.s: next Inrecords meet the beers meeting anyone?:)

Shane

Future approaching

As every recent days, today was a very productive office time. We sorted out all the details needed for the event to run smooth, successful and stay attractive. Annalies (our guiding teacher) had her birthday a day before and today she got some tulips from us, a card and a birthday song.
We are very excited since next week our meeting with potential client might take place and we will hopefully see if the project gets a green light. It is crucial point in the small life of our team, because we all fell in love with our ideas and plans of implementing those ideas effectively.
Needless to say, everything depends on us and our careful approach to the client. After all, it will be a great loss not to have the project accepted. I would say, for both parties. =)
So, let's keep our fingers crossed.
Today is a Rookie Borrel event in the Stalker club in Haarlem. This time the party there will have some oriental theme. I personally go there and can't wait to relax and have a nice chat with all our office colleagues.
Inrecords wish you a pleasant weekend and we will see you next Monday! Don't forget to follow you heart meanwhile and do good things like smiling, helping others and creating nice new music =)

by Yana Kovtun,
Creative manager of Inrecords.

Another Day, Another Idea

Creative Skills and Product Launching were the main focus of today. The day began with the presentation of our product for our Innovative Product Launch class. Our idea a product that could give you the feeling of being in a live concert - ViGig. ViGig, which stands for Virtual gig, is a set of 3D glasses that plays 3D concerts of your own choice. You put them on, select your desired concert and your eyes will experience a 3D concert they have never done before. The other team’s ideas varied from a wristband that gives off an electric impulse to the beat of music so you can (feign) knowing how to dance, to a device in the style of a sat-nav which will give you suggestions on which places to visit while in a foreign country, based on your music preferences. All in all we have a very creative group of people who are obviously passionate about their field :)

Our group spent the rest of the day being quite productive, working on the creative skills assignment. We had to “create a problem” and follow six steps to try to come to a solution. It was a fun process, and even though we didn’t really get to a proper solution we enjoyed the process.

Although Quynh and David had to leave early to fulfill work obligations we creative juices continued to flow (after a quick lunch break.) We had an (optional) task from Kwela to use colour co-ordinated post-its to help us think of every aspect of our event from the perspective of a visitor. We are having a lot of fun thinking about every aspect of each concept within our event. We do tend to go off topic a bit, thinking of aspects in an organisers view rather than a visitor’s, so we have started taking notes of what we need to come back to and discuss again.

At the end of the day , which is only half an hour away, we will have accomplished a lot more than we thought we would have, especially with Kwela’s task making us really think about every little detail.

All in all we are enjoying Rookie, and have adapted to our new location very quickly.

Till next time,

Kelly & the rest of the beers ;)

InRecords

Budgets budgets budgets...

Hi there!

After a hectic week things are finally starting to calm down in the new Rookie office and we're getting back to our regular work week. After returning from Brussels last tuesday we came back to school on Wednesday in a brand new office space. Lots of light, not enough space, cold and then warm again sums up the office pretty well! We will have pictures of our new office up sometime this week!

The past few days for the InRecords team have been spent on further developing the budget for our projects. After a few meetings and get togethers with the experts at INHolland and our very own management team the decision has been made to prioritize the concept involving muzyQ over our band tour concept. The decision was not easy to make because we loved both concepts but decisions had to be made and we are happy to be working on the muzyQ concept over the coming few weeks.

After a few sessions with the financial experts and our very own expert David the budget for our muzyQ concept is coming along nicely. It took us many draft budgets to get here, and it will probably require us to make adjustments in the future, but we're happy with the results.

Tomorrow morning we will have our product launch pitches for IPL and then it's already the last day of the week!

Happy surfing!

Vincent,
for the InRecords team

Rookie goes Brussels

From Monday till Tuesday Rookie office left to Brussels. We needed some inspiration and good rest.The trip started with....snow! In March.

And minus temperature. Of course, we all didn't want to stay long outside and therefore spent most of the time indoors, visiting AB Concerts and popular local bars.

AB Concerts amazed by its history and informative tour arranged for us by its art-director. We got to know his point of view on the future of music business. He pointed out the trend of live performances and tipping of all the industries which serve concerts (e.g. sound, light engineering). So, this is definitely the area where the most money is nowadays. Therefore, it makes sense to work in tours, concerts, venues or booking.
He also mentioned that with Internet it is way easier nowadays to promote for unknown acts: just place the links to Myspace of the acts and audience can check how they perform live. Another interesting practice is the streaming of the concerts after the tickets are sold out. But here you must be careful with the resolution of the broadcast itself to ensure it doesn't break because of too many viewers.
Not to forget for those seeking nice internship, AB Concerts is opened for your CVs!
After such an interesting tour we had some time for dinner at the same venue. Meanwhile we enjoyed multiple pictures of big acts who performed at AB and good music in the bar. Meal was over the top and afterwards we headed to the local pubs. Because it was Monday night, even the best pubs such as MP3 and DNA looked very deserted. But we tryed our best to have fun even asked for some 90's music in MP3 but got very much of 2000' hits. So we went to conclusion that Brussels was probably ahead of the time in music and while we enjoyed Scooter, they already listened to Lady Gaga =)
Some of us got more than tipsy and started talking about magic boxes.=) Some of us tryed to play football with the cars. =))) Overall, trip was just as good as you can imagine!
One bad note will go to the hostel we stayed at, named Youth Hostel Van Gogh. Highly not recommendable to spend your night there! You will occur in the frozen rooms with collapsing beds, 1 mm thick pillows and ice cold showers.
The way back home was sunny and chilled. Now we are ready to work and conquer music worl!

" We are Sushi - hungover " !

The entire crew of inRecords went to eat Sushi last night (All you can eat !) at the Kyoto Cafe, Amsterdam. Only VIncent and David were missing out on this gathering but we're all pretty sure that we're gonna have another nice Sushi night =)

After a few days of less work at school than before we finally got some feedback about our band tour as well as for our preliminary report (IPL). That made us discuss our concepts more in detail and gave us more work to do.
Above that, most of the team did the Peer Assessmet for our coach today and we had a thorough discussion about which bands to choose for the tour.
We managed to wrap it up to 4 bands in the end.

Concerning the next week, we had to plan on what needs to be done next and also how we are going to do the assignment of the creative skills class. This was necessary as we will be gone for 2 days in Brussels next week.

Yay ! Should be fun ...

Tonight some of us might go to the Rookie Borrell in Haarlem but others decided to recover from the "Sushi-hangover" or simply keep their energy for Brussels !

;)



Quynh

Rookie's; but not for long!

The day started off with a complete team this morning, the first time since we all came back from our vacation last week. On the program today is the project plan and what still needs to be done to hand these in for review at our management team and the experts that will analyze them. We divided some of the work that we could do before we get the feedback on our project proposals back.

We will have to provide more details and more specific plans for the project plan so we are busy doing research and making decisions on the look and feel of each concept that was in our project proposal. The project plan is supposed to be a more substantial and detailed document, it should basically be the last document before the production program goes into effect and we leave the preparation phase of our concepts. This means that the design and tone of our project plan is very important because it will be the last official change we have to add and remove things from our concepts before the final framework of each concept is finished, and more or less set in stone.

For our band concept we are currently developing it further in terms of final band and venue selection, before we can start contacting third parties we will first need finish of the design of the tour so we have some visuals to offer parties we want to contact and work with. Next to this we are in the process of finalizing the marketing and communication plan for the band tour with regards to sponsors, media partners and other external parties we might want to work with.

Our muzyQ concept is going a bit slower because we are more dependent on muzyQ itself before we can make any concrete decisions regarding our project proposal. We still need to receive feedback from our coaches and experts on the project proposals as well, making it harder to progress in a constructive manner with the muzyQ concept. We are anxiously awaiting feedback for our muzyQ concept and are looking forward to continue working on it.

Besides all of the work we are still cheerful and enthusiastic about Rookie but most importantly organizing quality projects at the end of our school semester!

Vincent van Dijk
and the rest of the InRecords RMI team.

=)

First Monday Music Meeting + First Creative Session

Blog

This our blog of the day, but since we had a great evening yesterday, we will talk about that first.
Yesterday evening we (Shane, Yana, Kelly, Quynh and David) attended the First Monday Music Meeting in Hotel V in Amsterdam. Since we went there straight after office hours, we were there very early. That’s why we decided to have some drinks first, in ‘Café Kale’, opposite to Hotel V. That way we could really easily see if there were any people arriving, in the mean while we had a great time.

Around eight PM we went to the Hotel V, since we saw that there were other people as well. Some of our classmates (Robin, Maxime, Bas, Yana and Laura) were there as well, as was Kwela. We had some quite interesting conversations with our own group, but we also met a couple of other people. We have talked to a guy who had his own recording business, called Right Track, and he was promoting that as well. We also talked to Luuk, who practiced in muzyQ once for free. But he told us that he thinks that muzyQ could use some promotional attention, and after we have told him of our ideas he thought it would be a good thing to do.

Today we continued working on both concepts, but unfortunately we still didn’t get any feedback on our proposals from our coaches, so we can’t really start working on all the details. Another setback is that Vincent is still sick, and Quynh has joined him unfortunately. But we have still done some other work during the day of course; we worked on the financial part of both projects, since Sanne wanted it in a new format. We also worked on the bands of our Tour. It’s quite hard to decide which bands are actually best to ask for our tour. But we will manage.

We have also had a creative session, organized by Yana. The idea was that we had to think of as many thing that you can do with a microphone, in order to create a more creative vibe. There were a lot of weird things in the end, such as using the microphone cord as a lasso

We hope to get the feedback on our proposals tomorrow, and that Quynh and Vincent are feeling better.

InRecords

Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow..

After one week of no Rookie at all we started today early again. Everyone of our team was present except Vincent who is sick. The main task of the day was finishing IPL. Quynh already had made a big part of it. We finished it and send to Janine.

We were hoping that today we could get some feedback on our proposals. But we still have to wait for Kwela and Mira to give as feedback. As soon as Annelies is back we get an official go or no-go. We are now allowed to contact bands, sponsors etc. So it doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to do this week.

We heard to today that we have to move to the sport centre outside of the school. We looked at the place and weren’t sure how it will work but we will see. We are going to be there after our trip to Brussels.