AAU Spring Music Festival: The Making of
On Saturday, 23rd April 2022, AAU hosted its first-ever Spring Music Festival. This external extravaganza featured multiple musicians both inside and outside of AAU as well as artists, crafters, and dance performers. How did we end up with such a cool event? The festival was created, executed, and brought to life by 3rd-year Business Administration student, Jakub Kanovics! With a team of fellow student creatives, Jakub has created a much-anticipated event that is rumored to make a comeback next year… watch this space!
This is the first-ever music festival at AAU, how did you find the process of setting up and executing this festival?
This entire process was new to all members of the organization team as no member had prior experience with setting up and executing a festival. Even though this was not a massive “three-day line-up and ten stages” festival, a lot of effort goes into planning the event, scheduling, booking, promoting, etc. During the Spring semester, planning this event became extremely time-consuming as we were having weekly meetings and independently working on individual responsibilities within the festival planning- looking for performers and contacting them, creating graphics for promotion, or communicating our needs with the chief of production at the island! All in all, it was definitely an enjoyable process but also very challenging.
Were there any obstacles/challenges to overcome along the way?
We certainly encountered obstacles! Though luckily for us, they were mostly minor details. For example, parking for performers presented a small hurdle. Parking in Prague is notorious already so looking for parking spots with all-day parking tickets for large-sized cars or vans in the center of Prague was harder than anticipated. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a solution for one of our bands however, they managed to find a way to solve it themselves.
Another challenge was communicating the audio requirements between performers and the chief of production and sound technicians. Me, with almost zero knowledge of the audio requirements of bands, I was surprised looking at a full A4 list of audio input requirements from each band and was fully unaware of where to all get it. Thankfully, we had two amazing sound technicians who took care of it, so again, everything worked out well.
How did the festival surpass your expectations?
Firstly, I was surprised that the festival experienced no time delays in the schedule/program which was one of the aspects I was most worried about. I drafted the schedule at least 3 or 4 times as I couldn’t be sure, having never run a festival before, how long it would take a band to set up, perform, and exit the stage. However, it appears that I guessed correctly as everything went according to the time plan!
Secondly, I was not expecting the festival to last 8 hours, from 13:00 to 21:00. Our initial idea was to start at 14:00 and finish by 20:00, however, we had an extra performer who we were eager to have with us, so we decided to prolong the festival by two additional hours. An additional benefit was that the extra time allowed for us to have longer breaks between performances, allocate more time for setup, and thus worry even less about time delays.
Lastly, and most importantly, the number of people that showed up to enjoy the festival surpassed my expectations the most- whether they were from AAU or not. I don’t know the exact number of visitors but I would expect that we had, at least, 1000 people turnover, which was reflected in the never-ending lines for drinks and food. I remember when Tobleronchik was playing, so many people were dancing in front of the stage. It just blew my mind! People were dancing and enjoying the event all the way until the end, so there is nothing more we could have asked for.
Thank you to everyone who came.
Missed the line-up? Check out the performers: