The End!

So, we’ve reached the end! It’s come as a bit of a surprise really, it doesn’t feel like we’ve been here for almost a year and a half! Looking back over our time here, it’s amazing to remember all the things we’ve done, working with so many teams and on so many exciting projects in some amazing buildings.
My personal highlight of my time here was working in The Old Courtroom during The Brighton Festival last year. I had such a fantastic time and learnt so much about managing a building. I made some valuable personal and professional contacts (one of which led to a trip to Glastonbury!) which I have maintained. I am currently working with some of them and am plan on continuing to do so well into the future.
I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed working on the special events that have occurred over the duration – both Royal Pavilion Christmases, White Night 2010 and the numerous private views just to begin with!
Recently, working on the Young People’s Video Project with Rachel and various youth groups has also been thoroughly enjoyable and gave me the chance to have some creative and managerial input into a project.
And of course working in one of the most iconic buildings in the country has been a complete privilege. To be able to visit areas of the buildings that are not open to the public and to learn so much about the history of the venues and the people involved with them has been a joy and I feel so lucky to be able to do so, so early in my career.

The Apprenticeship course has been a brilliant programme of work for me to follow with a high emphasis on vocational learning, with the opportunity to produce written work with space to research our sector and develop our own opinions and ideas. Working with City College to gain a recognised qualification and create a large portfolio of evidence has been completely invaluable. Marcus, our assessor, has been such an amazing person to work with and a fantastic mentor. I’m really proud of the work I produced and hope that it reflects me and will help me to achieve my future goals!

As for the future, I have been applying to drama schools to study Stage Management and Technical Theatre from September. I’m still waiting to hear if I have any offers, but in the meantime I will be busy working at The Old Courtroom and stage managing two shows in another venue during the Festival in May. I will continue to work with The Treason Show at the Pavilion Theatre as well as extending my contacts and experience in other ways. Working at the Royal Pavilion and Museums has helped me develop my knowledge and skills of working within public venues as well as putting on events. It reinforced my thought that working in the arts sector is the right choice for me.

I would like to thank everyone who allowed Zak and I to work with them during our time here and for being so welcoming and patient. Special thanks to John Cooper and Mike Eaton for organising everything and giving us this opportunity.

Last week Zak and I met with the leader of the council, Mary Mears, and councillor David Smith, the Cabinet Member for Culture along with John, our manager at the Pavilion, Mike, the Council’s apprenticeships officer and Marcus and Jean from City College. We were officially awarded our completion certificate, had our photograph taken many times and received some very kind words.

Cassie

The Royal Pavilion & Museums Foundation

Me again,

If you can stand to read another of my postings, I’d like to talk a bit about the Foundation, I worked with them as part of the fundraising team. There were lots of good times, for me at least!

It was interesting in the fact that this department is very entrepreneurial, where most of the other departments I worked in had money come from budgets or grants for different projects.

So the whole approach to money and business was very different and creative.

This meant work was very varied for me, I got to take part in the construction of their new website.

I did leaflet drops, stewarding at some of the department’s events and got to see a Magic Lantern show, I would never have gone if I had not been working here, but it was great.

Abi, Li-an and Rob were great fun to work with, mainly because they are all interesting characters and as a team they compliment each other very well, so I definitely loved the vibe (which is something I thought I’d never say) in this team.

Just to add, the work that I did with their website went towards my final piece of course work and got me a pass, so thanks again to the foundation.

Just to stress the importance of external funds a bit to anyone who doesn’t work at the Pavilion, I’ve worked in the facilities department for a large duration of my time here and after seeing first hand the list of maintenance issues, the money raised from the Foundation could greatly help us keep together Brighton’s most precious place.

Zak

Hi All

I'm sorry it’s been so long since we’ve updated our blogs but I’m going to lightly touch on some of the things that I have got up to over the past months.

The Cleaning Team

This was short and sweet (just a week) and I’ve got to say that trying to do this job was a real eye-opener.

I don’t think there’s anyone on the Pavilion site who works constantly as hard as this lot do, in particular Michelle, who managed me during the week.

Yes, I could only manage a week! Michelle gives a whole new meaning to elbow grease with the things that she does.

Here are some of the duties I performed in the team.

Cleaning toilets, vacuuming the carpets, I not sure of the proper name so I’m going to call it ‘dust mopping’ (the clue is in the name I’ve given it), mop and shine/ waxing the floors.

The main pressure about working in the cleaning team is the time constraints, there is so much to get done that I ended up doing surface cleaning and not achieving a really deep clean (Michelle and the other are much better at cleaning then me). If anything goes wrong in the morning such as a spill or flood one or more of you cleaning duties has got to suffer.

I could go on and on but the bottom line is they all work very hard and they are all great at it to.

So if you’re reading this and you work at the Pavilion or Museum sites, and you see one of the cleaners have just MOPPED a floor, then please can you take the long way round it!

Thank you.

One last note, at the end of the week Michelle gave me a going away present, which doesn’t usually happen to me so I was delighted.

It was this, (picture below), a duster, a memento of my taste of hard work and proof to anyone who doesn't believe that I’ve touched a cleaning product in my life.

Guys if you read this, thanks for having me, it was great!

Zak

Well, firstly, I’d like to apologise for a lack of updates. Lots of things have happened and we’ve both been incredibly busy!

Whilst working with the Learning team, I have been involved in a couple of major events. Firstly there was the White Night festival in October, a celebration of the cultural happenings in the city by opening arts venues into the night and putting on special events for one night only. I was working in the Music Room in the Pavilion, looking after the musicians that were performing in the room and making sure the public were well behaved and flowed through the building. The night went really well – we had almost 2000 visitors over the course of the evening and everyone was really positive about the events that were happening in our venues.

Secondly was Christmas at the Royal Pavilion. This was a five-day event held in the pavilion in the run up to Christmas in which children can visit Father Christmas and go on a special tour of the Pavilion. I was heavily involved in the organisation of the event, mainly by planning and buying the presents for the children to receive – nearly 1000 of them! I also had to buy lots of wrapping paper and spent a day wrapping presents with Foundation volunteers. During the event, I was running round, making sure the actors who play Father Christmas, his elves and various characters from the Pavilion (including the cook and Prince George) were all ok and running to time and generally helping the other people working on the event, as well as aiding the visitors. The event went really well and we have received a lot of positive comments.

Zak and I paid a visit to the Lighthouse digital media centre in The Lanes at the beginning of November. One of their employees, Alice, has been doing the same award as us through City College and we’ve met her a few times. It’s really nice to have someone to chat to who is doing similar work with College and finding out how she involves her coursework into her job. We were met by Alice and her college Jamie and were given a tour of the venue and an overview of what they do and how they work. It was interesting to find out how unique the venue is and about the projects that they do.

Just before Christmas, Zak and I completed our course!! We each made a 20 minute presentation for our Technical Certificate about the organisation in which we work and how it fits into the Creative and Cultural sector. We did our presentations in front of Marcus, our assessor and Jean who is City College’s skills advisor who were both really happy with our work! A copy of our presentation along with our award folders have gone off to the College to be assessed before we get our certificates! It was really exciting to complete our qualification and to now be able to concentrate on working until our time here ends at the end of the month.
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Recently, I’ve been working on a project with the Community Engagement Officer to produce a video to promote young people using our services. I am working with a film maker and various groups of young people who use Brighton Museum, such as Brighton Youth Theatre and the Museum’s Event Collective. If the film makes its way onto YouTube, I will make sure I post it here.

I have also been working on a project with Fundraising which is still secret at the moment but is very exciting and meant I had a lovely morning in London visiting the Sir John Soane museum to meet with their Director and Head of Fundraising.

I also spent a few days with Kevin Bacon, the Curator of Photographs, uploading images onto the asset bank and scanning slides. It was really nice to work with a curator, even though it was only for a short time, as we haven’t had much contact with collections during our time here.

We've got lots to do in our last few weeks here but I'll make sure I do a last post before we leave!


Cassie

Exhibitions

Ok, I would say I’m quite reliant on deciding if my time with a department is going to be good or not, by the first impression I get by meeting the team.
So I can’t tell you what a delight it was meeting the exhibitions team over in the Brighton Museum. I was greeted with lots of lovely cakes and biscuits and was promised more to come, oh yeah and the work plan set for me was pretty good too.
Firstly I got to help bring down the exhibition over in Hove called Touching Art, Touching You, Which is the last tour exhibiting in Hove Museum I believe.
That was good fun. Later I help pack up the From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House exhibition which was interesting because it was so different to the one I did in Hove.
An example of this is the no touching rule. The art work in Sickert to Gertler gallery in Brighton you had to use gloves for whenever you would move a piece of art or had to give it a condition check. But in hove because Touching Art, Touching You exhibition was all about touching and feeling the art, there were no need for gloves.
Now this is when things started to get interesting. I’ve seen how bring down an exhibition, now I would get to see one put up.

Once all three of the temporary galleries over in Brighton Museum were emptied of Sickert to Gertler , along came the new exhibition Strange and Familia part of the bpb (Brighton Photo Biennial).

Basically this exhibition is about how 3 photographers (one who is from the USA and another from Japan) see Brighton. The American photographer collaborated with his 8 year old daughter that gives yet another interesting twist and angle. HP lent a special printer to print out all the photographs and in what is apparently a world’s first there are no frames on any of the pictures in the exhibition. We used magnets to hold up the pictures.

Here’s a link if you would like to know more about the exhibition http://www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk/WhatsOn/Pages/BMAGphotobiennial2octto14nov10.aspx.

Zak

I worked with the Fundraising team for three months over the summer. For most of that time we were working together on producing and delivering a door drop for the Royal Pavilion and Museums Foundation. This was done to raise awareness of the charity to residents of Brighton and Hove and has proved to have been a very successful way of increasing interest.
Other jobs that I worked on include developing the social networking sites that I mentioned before, which are both growing steadily, helping Li-an with processing new members applications and sending out their membership packs. For the most recent mail out to the members of the Foundation, I compiled a competition crossword for the newsletter!

I have been working with the Learning team for a month now and I’m very busy. I’ve been working closely with the organisers of the Christmas events and am taking on part of the organisation for the project, as well as looking into developing the African Masks school session, helping at early years sessions, preparing for Diwali and White Night events and generally integrating myself into the department.

Zak and I have been working on the technical certificate part of our apprenticeship coursework. This is a really interesting piece of work and a chance for us to do a bit more research into the sector that we work in. We have to write a couple of presentations to show our knowledge of the creative and cultural sector and how creative ideas are developed and put into place. I’ve been doing research into museums of natural history around the country and how they tailor themselves to appeal to children. I’m comparing what I find to what the Booth Museum offers. It’s very interesting to see what services other museums offer as a whole and to what extent they provide to younger audiences.

Cassie

Hi all!

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been working in Faculties with Robin and Louise over the past few months.

Sadly my time with the Faculties team has come to a end, but when one door closes another door opens. On that note I’m very happy to announce that I’m now working with the exhibitions team and very much look forward to telling you how I get on.

Now, at the request of a college I’m going to talk a bit about how a leak next to

Firstly, the leak had started in the early hours in the morning and was due to rain. By the time I arrived staff were already dealing with it.

On this day the museum was closed but if it hadn’t have been we would have roped off the area surrounding the leak so members of the public were not put at risk.

We immediately started mopping up the excess water on the floor and walls, and a bucket was put under the leak. The next issue was to find the source of the problem and fix it.

We discovered the problem was one of the tiles on the roof had broken letting the water in, which then would seep through a void, which then came through the ceiling.

But you can’t access the roof when it’s raining out side, because it is too dangerous, so there was no way to stop the leak in the short term.

The next step was get in contact with the curator in charge of the paintings next to the leak, so they could make the decision if the painting should be taken down or not.

Thankfully there was no damage done to the paintings and it had stopped raining so there was no need to take it down, but if there had been, a small lifting contraption would have been used to help lift the painting down safely.

Now that it was safe, Robin and I headed up to the roof to see what could be done to fix the tile. Unfortunately the tile was out of our reach and was also in a disgusting area where some pigeons lived. They had made quite a mess!

A cleaner had to be called in before attempting to fix the tile, due to the diseases you can pick from bird excrement, but after all that the area was cleaned and the tile repaired, and now I can safely say that’s one less tile worry about on Brighton museums roof!

Thanks for reading.
Zak