ENTRY GATE

First impressions count, and the entrance to the Faire is where you get to set the stage for anything and everything that comes once you’ve passed through it. More importantly, the entrance is the departure point, where guests leave their 21st century lives, and their cars, behind and travel back in time. The entry gate is a time machine, and it is the very first moment you get to confirm to your audience that they aren’t in Kansas anymore*. There are lots of ways to construct this entryway, but my personal favorite is those gates that allow costumed actors to greet approaching guests from above. Although this may be impractical all day long, it is the perfect location to create an elaborate opening ceremony to mark the beginning of the day. Building anticipation, pointing out people in the crowd, and suggesting the wonders just beyond the gate is the perfect way to begin any Faire day. Since the Faire is all about arriving “just in time” for a celebration, this is the point where the celebration begins. Walking under that gate changes your audience and suggests that once through this threshold, it is time to get down to some serious Play!

When you are making your initial investment in a new Faire I always recommend that a large amount of your budget be spent on making the entrance look its best! Even though your guests will only experience it fleetingly, the quality of your entrance is what will set the tone for the experience within. A poor first impression is very hard to scrub away, but a good one will bolster up expectations and create a lasting impression as your audience exits again at the end of the day.

*Alright, unless you are at the Kansas Renaissance Festival

FAIRE BUILDINGS

As the owner, creator, and promoter of your Faire, you are also responsible for creating the framework that you will be populating with the booths of those participants that will constitute the bulk of your event. The success or failure of your Faire will rest on your ability to create the thematic structures that will set the tone, and inspire the quality of the structures and graphics that will make up the rest of your Faire. At a minimum you will be building a front entrance, ticket booths, stages, information booths, and ale stands (if you choose). Every one of these structures will be looked at as examples of the quality you expect from your participants. If you scrimp on the appearance of these buildings then you only have yourself to blame if the rest of your event is shabby or half-heartedly constructed. This means that your structures will need to be ‘period’, well constructed, and display the very best graphics you can afford. Inspiring by example is the rule for all great Faires, and this should be foremost in your thinking as you build your event. The good news is that all other themed structures can come later, with each year adding to your growing store of buildings, graphics, and booths.

In the following pages you will find descriptions of the structures you will be designing and building, and their importance to the overall success of your Faire. Many of these buildings can come over time, but their role and influence are describe in detail.

PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES

Time was that a photo taken while on vacation ended up in a drawer, but today we live in the world of Facebook and Flickr, and more often then not images taken in the morning are posted all over the internet by that evening. The ability for people to find, share, comment on, and repurpose images taken inside your event has never been better, and let’s face it, people love getting their pictures taking in front of stuff! This means free advertising for you, and if the stuff they are taking pictures of themselves in front of has your event’s logo on it, all the better. Whenever you build any large prop or structure for your Faire, think about how your guests might interact with it. Better yet, think of how they might take a picture of themselves next to, on top of, or inside of it. This is free advertising for you, and added experience for your guests. It doesn’t get better that. So if photos of people sitting in the Queen’s sedan chair (when she is not using it), or single handed killing George’s Dragon show up on the Internet or YouTube, this is great for you and your event.

If Your Design Depends on Someone Else Doing Something to Make it Work, You Have Already Failed

This is a design principle that I have found to be universal, no matter the size of the project. If you design something that will not work without the efforts of another, then you can guarantee that it will never work. My experience with this design principle occurred as part of a request to solve a design problem inadvertently built into the Northern Renaissance Faire site.

The Main Stage for the Faire site was located in a perfect natural earthen bowl, which made for a wonderful theatrical experience, but the entrance to the area was easy to miss as you walked by. We would periodically hear complaints that guests could not find the stage to see the main Queen’s show, so we knew we needed to build something that would draw attention to the entrance. While at Disney a budget for a project might be 100 million dollars, at the Faire my per-Faire expense account was usually closer to $3000. I was asked to build a barker’s platform, or a small tower that I was promised a paid actor would stand upon all day and call passersby to the stage. This project ate nearly my entire budget and it generated a huge, heavy, but OSA safe platform for an actor to climb and stand upon. The morning of the first day of Faire I wandered past the stage and saw that the tower was completely missing! After hunting around I discovered that the ice delivery truck crew had dragged the tower (no small feat) and tossed it back stage. The tower was in their way, so, they moved it. After much scolding the tower was replaced, and as far as I can remember I never once saw an actor stand upon it and do anything. I did however see that a participant was stationed at the base of it all day to keep drunken guests from climbing it and falling off on their heads. Although built with all the best intentions, the design and purpose failed due to that lack of the actor to make it work as designed.

RAG ROPE

Assuming you can tie things to or suspend thing from a nearby tree (not all sites will allow this), think of ways to festoon this natural element, like a Christmas tree, with your products, décor, or just fanciful baubles. One very effective decoration is the use of “Rag Rope”. This consists of a natural looking hemp rope with brightly colored torn rags tided and hanging from it in intervals of 1 foot or so. Alternating the colors creates a festive effect that can be draped in and among the branches or be suspended between your booth a the tree. Similarly, multi-colored pennants work well, although they can look a little like a modern day used car lot if they look too new, so use with caution. Also prayer flats are very nice, but only use if there is some reason your wares have some close connection to Tibet, otherwise avoid using them. An international district or world marketplace area of the Faire could be enhanced by the use of prayer flags, as would many eastern mystics booths, but few other places are appropriate. Another variation of the Rag Rope are Rag Hoops… like the rope, “Rag Hoops” are just like they sound, a round wooden hoop, roughly the size of a Hoola-Hoop, with colorful rags tied at intervals, also suspended from tree branches look fantastic and greatly enhance the overall look of a Faire.

WAY FINDING & NOMENCLATURE

These are fancy ways of saying, “Clever ways to keep people from getting lost”. Signage that informs your audience where they are, and how they can relate to an area, is vital to the success of your Faire. Signs are your way of tell people where they can go to find what, but it is also a way to tell them how they can “play” in each area.  A sign that points to Gypsy Camp is one way, but if the sign looks like gypsies actually made it, then this does even more to communicating what might be experienced once you arrive there. It is also all too easy to get too “cute” with the names of places, or mislead your audience’s expectations. Calling a place “Faerie Princess Wood” is fine, but there bloody well better be Faeries and a Princess when you arrive. The language of the Renaissance is probably the richest in history, so take the opportunity to find clever ways to name things, but be careful, calling something “Potter’s Way” might suggest ceramic artists reside there, but calling it “Potter’s Field” could mean something else entirely.

GRAPHICS & SIGNAGE

 If you think of your Faire layout as a Christmas Tree, your graphic and signage are the ornaments you hang around it each year. While craft booths and stages will fill out the body of your event, the hanging signs and graphics will set the mood and help your guests navigate through your event. Signs, whether painted on canvas or plywood, are a growing investment in the look and feel of your Faire as it grows bigger each year. Signs are easy enough to store during the off-season, and easy to hang and remove before and after the event. The more rustic your signs the better, and the hand painted variety will do much more to transport your guests then anything printed at Kinkos. The 21st century offers us the tempting possibility that we could design our signage in the computer and just blow it up, the drawback is that this frequently is exactly what it will look like. Giant glossy banner do little to transport guests into the 16th century and will ultimately erode the illusion you are trying to achieve with all of your other efforts. It is much better to invest in a few hand-painted, beautiful signs each year and slowly add to your collection, then to cover your event with the equivalent of Budweiser banners.