After a couple of weeks of throwing around ideas for names, we decided to thrash it out over a jug of beer at the Exeter.

The list of names we came up with included: fresh walls and big balls, two cans, buff marks, drip, paint&paste, urban repo, buff street, ministry of urban beautification, bombfest & street dreams.

Two jugs later, things were getting messy and we’d rapidly regressed to names like: viking pastry, sticky mess, fresh air smells funny & fuck street. It was clear that things weren’t moving in entirely the right direction, so we called it a night.

The next day while we all struggled at work and uni, the only name we could all agree on was Street Dreams.

So, from this day forth (well until tomorrow at least) the official name of the festival for 2010 is:

Street Dreams
Adelaide Urban Art Festival

Hope it doesn’t suck.

Si.

The last month and a bit has been pretty exciting. Matt and I have been emailing all the artists we know to see who wants to be involved and everyone seems genuinely excited about it.

This isn’t helping my nerves much, but Matt is staying disturbingly confident through it all, and between him and the cold pints of pale I’m slowly coming round to the idea that the festival will indeed work.

Each week we have a little drink at the famous Exeter board room (aka beer garden) to bitch and moan about the amount of buffing the council has been doing, and scheme cunning plans to put up new work in buff-proof places.

Tonight was a special meeting, because two new faces came along and with them brought an awesome new energy and dynamic.

The two people I’m talking about are Ankle & Tim Grisbrook. Ankle is an old friend who started a little illustration / paste-up group at the pub with me called ex-a-sketch. He’s an inspiring young lad and since those days has gone onto putting up loads of cool shit on the streets.

Tim Grisbrook is an Industrial Design student, who’s helped make lots of awesome stuff out of scraps of wood and cardboard.

So now the two of us has become four, and with it I think a much more diverse festival.

We’ve started thinking about new names for the festival too. Although we’re really appreciative of the support that Chris & Yasemin have given us in putting things together, we’re ready for a new start.

Si.

The waiting game is a funny thing. After the mania of balancing spreadsheets, costing artist fees, rent, paint & insurance fees, things have been really really quiet.

The JB Seed people seemed genuinely happy with our application getting us onto the shortlist… but since then it’s been eerily quiet, and I’ve been getting a little fidgety.

 

 

 

So today I sent them a little email just asking when we’d be likely to hear back, and their response was quite awesome!

“We’ve decided to grant you money for ST5K. Congratulations! We really like the project and can’t wait to see how it turns out!!”

What does this mean? Well it means that instead of running the entire festival on $300 as we did last year, we’ll have a couple of thousand dollars to put towards advertising, inviting some awesome artists to get involved, paying for council permits to paint murals and cover a huge amount of paint!

Its pretty exciting, but a little daunting too.

THANK YOU JB SEED!

I think we might need some extra help to pull this thing off.

Anyone interested?

Si.

After sending in our JB Seed grant application pretty much on the deadline, its been barely two weeks… and then this morning we got this email back:

“Congratulations!
You are on The JB Seed Art For The Public shortlist.

In order to decide who will be successful in this years round of funding we would like to consider your application further.
Please consider the following list of questions and formulate your responses – these responses are to be received by us (via email) on or before 5pm on Monday the 29th June 2009.”

Awesome!
We don’t completely suck.

Fingers crossed…

Simon.

In our spare time we don’t like drinking in bars, listening to music, pasting up characters… no, in our spare time we love sitting in dark rooms writing grant applications.

This week Matt & I have spent dozens of hours getting grief from our girlfriends, as we sit writing the JB Seed grant application. I think we make a reasonable team, Matt is the figures genius and makes sure our budget of paint and artists balance, while I crap on in 1,000 words or less why we’d put their money to great use. Then I crack the whip on Matt again and he re-works my rough-as-guts words into a symphony of grant writing gold.

The final application seems to have come together quite well, and its actually made us come up with some pretty decent new ideas of how to spend money efficiently on a great festival.

I’m secretly optimistic, but then, I’m pretty sickeningly optimistic about everything.

Long live ST5K 2010.

Simon.