GALA72:

Art Weekend

72 Hours of Art Immersion in New York City

GALA72 is a three-day New York student art weekend event on 4/12-4/14, 2019. It featured gallery, live music, street dance performance, drama and musical happening across three venues in downtown Manhattan. As the associate producer, I came up with the concept of GALA72 and led the production team to successfully execute the whole process. I specified my responsibility and leadership in branding, marketing, product design, video production and digital experience.

Concept

NYUCSSA, a Chinese student association with over 100 members, hosts GALA every year in the form of an art festival. Previously in 2018, GALA is a 3 to 5-hour student show where drama, live music and drama performance were put together in one show at Playstation Theatre. This year, we got a bigger budget and wanted to innovate this tradition by expanding the scope and the depth. We invited 20 directors who came up with two drama pieces, two street dance performance, one contemporary dance, two live music performance and one musical piece. Beyond that, we added a whole new exhibition section.

When we had this radical idea in mind, we moved into the brainstorming part. How could we fit all these genres of art into a coherent concept? Why would people want to participate in this event?

I pitched the idea of GALA48 across our executive team which eventually became GALA72

72 Hours of Art Immersion in New York City.

We came up with three venues across downtown Manhattan:

198 Allen St: Immersive Drama Performance.

393 Broadway: Art Gallery.

Irving Plaza: Live House

We inspired our guests to step into New York's phenomenal downtown art scenes and locations with the wonderful performances and events by our creativity team.

Branding & Graphic Design

Student, Art Show, Diverse, Modern

Youthful, Pop, Indie, Dynamic, International

We gradually narrowed down our branding direction of GALA72 to a few phrases and key words. We want it to be artistic and independent, but we also need to capture our main audience - college students. We derived references in pop culture from the themes of our performances.

Future, Technology, Exploration

And we further derived it into something visually compelling:

GALA72: Space Station

We looked into NASA's old stock image of the space station and came up with our key branding. A logo combing GALA72 and Chinese character of space station, and a colorful gradient swatch.

We applied this visual identity in 5 versions of posters and flyers, 1 playbill/booklet, over 20 social media posts, websites, videos, tote bags, hand bands, stage visual effect, etc.

Website

I led the design and development of the website GALA72.com for tickets selling and info updates. (website is offline after the event finishes). Due to time limitation, we only have a week to make a functional and compelling website. I made a tough but important decision to move the whole process to a third-party web development platform with ready-to-use ticket system. We designed the whole website in three days to ensure the tickets are available for purchase before we start the campaign.

I assigned design team leaders, content team leaders and media team leaders to assist my management of the whole campaign team of 40 people. We figured out an efficient way to produce content, design and other media form and quickly polish the campaign material. The final 2 weeks involving social media campaign content produced every day in an extremely fast pace.

Outcome

Eventually, the 72 hours of GALA72 became a huge success. Tickets were sold out in a week with over 800 participants. Our presence spread over three venues and three days:

198 Allen St for Immersive Drama Performance;

393 Broadway for Art Gallery;

Irving Plaza for Live House.

We inspired our guests to step into New York's phenomenal downtown art scenes and locations with the wonderful performances and events by our creativity team. Many local and international artists and performers presented their best to all the people we attracted and gathered. We turned New York into our stage, where we successfully completed our mission to bridge people with art in an organic, spontaneous immersion.

Marketing

I then led a campaign team of 30 people to start our campaign process. We focuses on creative social media campaign, online community construction and offline local community advertising.