Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Posters all over Colombo!

Ms. Tanuja gave us some brilliant news! One of her friends, Mr. Mohan, who owns a printing firm, has very generously agreed to print out all poster and tickets for us. It was an offer we couldn’t possibly afford to decline especially since sponsors weren’t confirmed at this point. Now all we had to do was design the ticket and poster and send it over to him to get printed. We asked for 500 tickets in books of 25 and 80 posters. Since we were running out of time, we used the poster Dylan initially designed for the auditions to give us a head start. By this time, Ms. Dihara from the administration has managed to finalize our sponsorships so we were able to put in their logos as well. We had Mobitel as our main sponsor, who managed to cover our sound cost completely, and Yes FM, a radio station, as our media sponsor.

The posters arrived the following Saturday so Ms. Tanuja, Christina, Priyanka, Tara and I, aided with four participants from outside OSC who volunteered to help, met us that morning to go stick them up. Ms. Shameela, who is in charge of service activities, got us a van to transport us around Colombo. We first went to a nearby Go Kart place, which only opened at 4 in the afternoon, so we Pri and Tara agreed to go to Jungle Juice nearby while we headed off to Waters Edge. Ms. Tanuja, Chritina and I spoke to the manager and convinced her to not only stick up posters but also sell some tickets. Pleased with our achievements, we went to Odel, a popular store in Colombo, where we all split up to cover more ground. I stayed at Odel, Christina went to Budz, a restaurant nearby, Pri headed off to CoCo Verandah and Ms. Tanuja took the van with Tara to go to CR&FC grounds. Odel refused to sell tickets unless we let them earn a 10% profit from what they sell so we had to back out because we didn’t want to give away what we earned. However, we did manage to stick some posters up and Ms. Tanuja came back saying that we could also sell tickets the next day at Jazz, which is a monthly social gathering at CR&FC grounds.

Next we went to Galleface where the best hotels were, dropping off Pri and Tara at Barefoot and Christina at McDonalds. Ms. Tanuja and I went to Cinnamon Grand to ask if we could put some posters there and they agreed to, taking some away..we never saw them put them up though! Crescat is a shopping centre right next to the hotel, so we spent some time asking some shops to put the posters up while we were waiting for the others.

Thinking we’d done enough for the day, we headed back to school, having stayed out at least 2 hours more than we expected. Since the next day was Jazz, Chris managed to go and publicize the event handing out photocopied brochures with the help of some friends. From a stroke of luck, she bumped into a lady who worked for Sunday Time, a newspaper, who said she’d gladly publish online an article on our concert! Now that was certainly worth her time.

The article can be viewed at:

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