Selling Out: We’ve written about our FlyBy Seating Chart initiative on this blog, and our efforts to reimagine the seating chart.
With the help of a camera-equipped drone (and its skillful pilot), we’ve been filming FlyBy videos inside and outside some of our partner venues. The videos capture the real-life experience of being at the venue, from entering the lobby to sitting in different sections and more.
3 comments:
I feel like I just read an article about google and how they are now taking pictures of stores for their maps application. With the advances in 360-degree cameras and other portable video devices along with the improvements of drone technology the ability to take space and make a digital version has never been easier. There is definitely a huge market for something like this but I am surprised that theater venues are one of them. The audience is going to see what is on the stage not what the space looks like and if I was planning on renting a space of this magnitude I would definitely want to see it in person. That being said I still think there is a huge market for this kind of technology and think there are many industries that could benefit from something like this especially if it continues to becomes more accessible.
Understanding the venue is so important. Back in high school our box office had a huge issue with calling and informing our audience of the types of seats they were sitting in. We were pretty good for a highschool when it came to ordering tickets online and seeing what seats were available. The only downside was off of the main grouping of chairs that covered half of the theaters there were two side back groupings that looked like balconies. Lots of people would register in those spots and we'd have to call and tell them they were floor level just like all the other seats. On the online map it appeared to be two separate floors, and in reality we only had one. So every main stage show we would have to cold call all the registered customers. If they had just formatted the website better or had a more detailed description we would be saved all the relief. Plus in a professional theater its nice to see the difference in the field of vision between a $50-$200 ticket to get the best deal.
It's interesting to see other people's box office stories because we never even had reserved seating in out theater. Owing to the nature of black box theaters and their capacity to modulate and test the boundaries of set design, often our seating arrangements were not what one would really call organized or structured, and therefore assign in numbers and letters to them, or drawing an online map every time the seating changed was really not feasible. It didn't really matter in the end though, since we were really not a big school, our maximum seating capacity was barely over 100 at any time, so we just had 15$ sit-yourself-anywhere tickets and that worked! Now if we were doing larger productions for a longer run perhaps I would have assigned seating If I were really pressed, but I think that the audience of an environmental stage and seating layout really appreciate being able to choose the their vantage point in the action once they come in.
Post a Comment