Marketing Manager Kirsty Celebrates One Year at HANDS ON

Marketing Manager Kirsty Celebrates One Year at HANDS ON

23^rd August 2011

A year ago today I started working at HANDS ON. And while I have started to get used to my rather strange surroundings, I am still occasionally startled by explosions, gun shots and smoke filling up the reception area. Always expect the unexpected at HANDS ON!

The last year has been a huge learning curve. As Marketing Manager, I have had to produce and oversee a variety of marketing communications. But I have also been exposed to this very interesting and varied industry: providing weapons, building sets, looking out military uniforms, creating special effects, rigging scaffolding and drapes, sourcing and hiring out props and much more.

As I am usually the one to pick up the HANDS ON telephone, I am the first point of contact for many of our customers, and I love hearing the bizarre requests they have… especially when they think it is really weird but it is actually something we hear all the time! “Swords for a wedding? Of course, when can you pick them up?” When customers come in, it is always great to hear what they are doing, and how they are putting a production together.

Not long after I started working here, I wrote a press release about East Kilbride Rep Theatre hiring props for “The Steamie” – particularly interesting as Perry had been props buyer on the original film. (Read the release here.) The article was published by several local papers, which was a pleasing start to my year at HO. 

Although many of our customers’ requests could merit an article, we can’t do it for every intriguing enquiry that comes our way. At the start of 2011 we gave the Comedy Unit our “Customer of the Year” award, and we also noted some high-profile jobs: building staging for The Wanted and Spellbound at EK shopping centre, providing swords for Biffy Clyro’s Kerrang shoot and rigging up Rhod Gilbert to make him fly (and also rigging up the Scotland Rugby Team to create an impressive line-out.) We have been fortunate to be involved in several great Scottish films as well: Perfect Sense, Neds, Blooded and Fast Romance. (Read more here.) As a small team, we need to keep each other up to date on the progress of each job, as we are all involved with them in some way.

From day one I was tasked with keeping our social media presence up to date: a pursuit which has now blossomed into daily Facebook and Twitter updates, a separate Facebook page for the suit of armour in our reception (albert.theknight) and a regular Blog.

This year we started thinking more strategically about our e-flyers, and now send different ones to different sectors of customer (rather than a generic newsletter) in order to focus on the products and services most relevant to their needs. We also send feedback emails to customers after every job, to make sure we are meeting those needs, and we really value the comments we receive. So on top of designing adverts, writing press releases, dealing with customers and updating all our online marketing, I keep our contact database up-to-date and create and send our bespoke e-flyers and emails to the right people. Busy busy!

When I am not working away at my desk, or meeting some of our huge range of customers, I can be found drinking too much coffee, singing along with Perry, correcting grammar, laughing at Perry in yet another military costume or doing a mad little dance in reception to refresh the mind. Thanks to HANDS ON, I am now used to hearing things such as “How big an explosion do you want?”, “Half a dozen minge clamps please!” and “Are you taking the pistol?”

The year has flown by, and I have relished getting to grips with an annual marketing strategy, meeting a fabulous range of customers and hearing the tales of thirty years in the industry from Perry and Cheryl. One year might not seem that much to them, but I have managed to pack a lot in! 

HANDS ON and Palindrome Theatre

DON’T SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT

Texas-based Palindrome Theatre Company (which, incidentally, doesn’t read the same backwards as it does forwards) are performing a unique adaption of Hedda Gabler at the Hill Street Theatre in Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival… with a little last-minute help from a Glasgow-based production company.

The team from Palindrome Theatre had been commissioned by ReMarkable Arts to stage their reworking of the Ibsen classic, and flew over to Scotland last Tuesday to begin their run. Nigel O’Hearn, the Artistic Director, was confident that the replica guns they were travelling with, integral to the script, would be arriving safely with them at Edinburgh Airport. But when they did not, he turned to Hands On Production Services in Glasgow for urgent assistance.

O’Hearn says, “Finding a firing replica gun, or starter pistol, in Texas is like finding an axe, or a handsaw – or anything marginally dangerous but practically useful. When Hedda Gabler was running in the States and I had to obtain a firing pistol for our production, it took me zero phone calls and twenty minutes. I walked into my neighbourhood gun store and asked for a firing cap pistol. They handed it to me, and I paid for it.” As O’Hearn was not a gun owner, he asked what he was to do when he travelled with it or took it anywhere. The response was “Well, it’s not real… So it’ll be no problem trying to take it with you wherever.”

O’Hearn accepted this answer (although he questioned the logic slightly), and the shop was content to send him on his way, after a few safety pointers, with a gun in a plastic carrier bag. “That is how assured gun-dude was that travelling with this thing would be absolutely no problem.”

While he recognises that he may be stereotyping Texans as cavalier with weapons, O’Hearn is keen to tell this story in order to explain “why I believed I wouldn't have any trouble locking a gun in a box, after showing it to some lady at an airport in Texas who put a piece of paper on it saying she checked it, and why I had full confidence that the gun would head with me to Scotland.

“For fellow international Fringers, let me enlighten you now: you CAN NOT take anything that looks like a gun into the UK, or continental Europe, with any sort of ease. Your gun laws are not their gun laws, and what you consider dangerous is not what others consider dangerous.”

Rather unsurprisingly, the replica weapon purchased by Nigel for Palindrome Theatre was taken away from them, in Amsterdam. He had a small, official-looking piece of paper taped to his luggage saying “confiscated materials." Nigel is not confident that he will see the gun again.

Palindrome Theatre’s production of “Hedda Gabler” ends with a gun shot, and there is a lot of action surrounding a gun. “As you might imagine, it tends to break the audiences' suspension of disbelief when someone has to pretend their finger is a gun, and someone else is reduced to shouting ‘BANG!’ at the end of a fairly dramatic play,” says O’Hearn.

He and the theatre group therefore landed in Edinburgh two days before their show opened without an essential prop. “Turns out, it is very difficult to procure a gun in the UK. Due to some laws passed a few years ago, they have become very hard to come by. For the most part, I think this is a positive thing. It does, however, become quite infuriating when one is producing an adaptation of a show written in the midst of the industrial revolution, when apparently guns were abundant and a playwright couldn't stand to end a show without a ‘BANG’.”

Fortunately, O’Hearn was pointed in the direction of Hands On Production Services in Glasgow. He called Hands On around 11am telling them that he needed a gun by 2pm the next day in time for the opening of the show. Although the company offered several delivery options, O’Hearn decided it would be less risky simply to come through to Glasgow and pick up the gun in person.

“When I arrived, my desperation and panic was soothed out of me completely. A selection of possible choices were laid out for me. Hands On has an arsenal of prop guns and weaponry from all eras, and they made sure we had guns that would fit our production's specific period. All appropriate paperwork was prepared, ready for me to read and sign. I was handled with great care and true interest in my production. I received a full tutorial from Perry, the armourer, on how to operate the gun. Suffice to say, when I left Hands On, I could breathe for the first time in 48 hours, because I knew my show would go on.

“That is, go on without my having to stand in the back of the house shouting, ‘Ka-blam!’”