It is a Wednesday. Next Tuesday I will be pitching the project to a panel of judges to gain the award of a grant which will pay for the majority of Unrecorded Project’s development. I have run out of money. What can I do?
I continue as best I can. I have been revising and revising the budget for the project while balancing the creative, idea made part of Unrecorded. Both are important and I need to concentrate on them equally to make sure the proposal is strong enough.
I worked through the budget yesterday, then asked my mathematically inclined brother to check through the figures with me. What I did not know before drafting the budget is that support-in-kind is so important to the production of a piece of performance. So I have been spending time working out a figure for the stuff I’ll be getting for free out of support and good will. It is always important to remember the help of those that give to your career as an artist. I recall this now, as spoken by a tutor during a workshop at Artsadmin. You are successful because others have faith in your ability.
So onto the figures. The first budget was complex and detailed, with two tables: one to state the overall project cost and another to show how the budget is divided between the R C Sherriff Trust and the No Strings Attached scheme. The new budget, for the second pitch, states everything in one table. It is divided into two parts: INCOME and EXPENDITURE. For a budget to work the figure for INCOME and EXPENDITURE should match up. Or if you are looking to make money from ticket sales, say, your projected targets should be put into INCOME and must be greater than the EXPENDITURE figure. If the opposite is true, then that means there is a DEFICIT and your project will make a loss.
I have listed both grants as a source of INCOME and their different uses in EXPENDITURE. Pretty standard really. However, for support-in-kind recources, I have placed them in both parts of the table so that they cancel each other out and come to a value of zero. I have also put in contingency at 5% of the budget. However I added this to the total before support-in-kind is added, as 5% of the overall total would push me over the £1000 limit of NAS*.
Thankfully my budget matches up, but I still need it to check and re-check again to make sure. The largest part of the budget is taken up by the rehearsal stage; this accounts for using ]Performance Space[ and my fee for the time spent in the studio. All of this bar £200 is unpaid. The £200 that comes from the R C Sherriff Trust grant amounts to two days paid work.
The £1400 unpaid is based on me spending two days per week in the spae rehearsing and developing the work. And I have not included the travel cost.
The reason I have managed to get access to ]Performance Space[ is I have decided to move studios there. Aside from access to a large space free of a stage for rehearsal, I am also looking forward to meeting the other artists and be part of a studio dedicated to Performance. I went down last week to check out the space and meet Bean, who was enthusiastic about Unrecorded Project. The great thing about undertaking this research and development process is the people that I meet along the way.
*No Strings Attached scheme
