What Is this Project You Keep Talking About?
In short, this project for me is simply a “Document Refresh.” I rebuilt every document in my library of templates, some seeing subtle tweaks and others seeing significant overhauling. I wanted to homogenize everything with a clean, uniform, “official” look.
A Brief History of My Documents
I started Stage Managing in college in the Fall of 2009. My first show I was given some templates from my institution (Normandale Community College) to get me started. Up until January 2018, I had been using the same Rehearsal, Performance, and Production Meeting Reports (with some minor tweaks) as I had been originally given. During the course of those 8 years, I had accumulated other documents from friends and colleagues, as well as having generated several of my own. In the last 3 years, many of my newly generated docs shared some basic formatting across them (things like font, color scheme, etc.), but nothing was rigidly consistent. I had amassed a small fleet of templates that all worked but looked like a rag-tag team of misfits. A personal problem to the umpteenth degree.
The Goals
In December of 2017, my Artistic Director, Ben McGovern, returned from an out-of-town trip where he directed a show with another company. He brought me some paperwork from his Stage Manager there who he really enjoyed working with. Two things really struck me:
- The Calendar made much more efficient use of the page than mine did.
- The Performance Report included tomorrow’s schedule, with formatting that was identical to the Daily Schedule document I was also given.
Those two things coupled with a long-standing desire to update my library (and a general feeling of “it’s time to be an adult and do something meaningful with your life”) spurned me into taking on this project. I didn’t write them out at the time, but I had several goals as I began:
- I wanted a cohesive style across all of my documents, including font, header/footer, use of color, and use of borders.
- I wanted my documents to be modular; easily added to or subtracted from in a consistent manner depending on the needs of the show.
- I wanted to particularly overhaul my Reports (Reh., Perf., Prod. Meetings) to make their styles uniform, where my current versions were effectively 2 different styles.
- I wanted to homogenize where I put specific design info across all my Reports, where it used to be somewhat scattershot.
- With the above in mind, I wanted to have a suite of documents were I could easily take data from one and seamlessly transfer it into another, such as adding a Daily Schedule to the bottom of a Rehearsal Report.
How’d it Start?
I started one night at the office (we were opening “The Last Five Years” that evening), finally deciding I had had enough waiting around for a knight in shining armor to come fix my problems for me. The first document that got attention? The Calendar. After that, I spent around 8 hours the next Saturday working on my Reports. 8 hours? Yes. It was here that I discovered that all of my new documents would be built using Microsoft Excel, where previously most documents were out of Microsoft Word with a handful out of Excel. I couldn’t get Word to do what I wanted it to do with the Header & Footer I had established in Excel on the Calendar doc, so I decided that I’d be happier learning how to make it all happen in Excel in the name of homogeneity.
From Start to Present
I started this while working on “Noises Off,” and was living in a world of old, ugly paperwork while simultaneously cultivating and crafting the next generation of sleek, sexy documentation. I ended up breaking a Stage Management rule regarding consistency once we hit tech week, and I introduced some of my new documentation to the team in the form of my updated Schedule doc (I did warn them about the change!). Once we hit Performances, I warned them of the new format that was my new Performance Report. The team responded positively to the new formatting, I had been touching base with some of my inner circle about the formatting (thanks Topaz and France), and have been updating, tweaking, and improving on things with each successive show. After over 40 hours of rebuilding, reformatting, retweaking, revising, reanything, it’s all been more or less tested in the fires of live production, and now I hand it off to you for your use.