Dissecting Ourselves: Autopsy Report for SDF’s Two 2024 Productions

I wanted to analyze our Temp Cupid run after it wrapped in February, but I didn’t get to it, and then in September we ran Limbo!, so I am combining both recaps into one post. Hopefully this will inform other immersive entertainment producers in Los Angeles to improve their experiences, as well as provide a peek behind the scenes of the Spectacular Disaster Factory.

We rarely do post-event feedback surveys with our audiences—probably a mistake—so this analysis is obviously one-sided and biased, but feel free to comment with your take if you attended either experience.  

Temp Cupid Autopsy

This was a joint production with The Immersive Art Collective, held at The Count’s Den in downtown Los Angeles as a Valentine’s Day interactive experience. This is the second time we’ve staged it.

The Numbers

• Seven amazing actors, with 1-2 volunteers as Cupid, Inc. employees.
• Ten scheduled shows—two per night for five nights: Saturday and Sunday, then Valentine’s Day, which fell on a Wednesday, followed by the next Saturday and Sunday.
  • Two shows were cancelled due to low ticket sales so there were eight total.
  • Each show ran about 90 minutes, from onboarding to exit.
• Maximum audience capacity was 28; the most we had was at the free dress rehearsal, with 15 people.
  • The ticketed shows averaged between 8-12 people.
  • We needed about 13 per show to break even, depending on which ticket tier was purchased.
• We charged $65 per person for general admission, and $85 for a VIP ticket, which included drinks, premiere choice of character, and a handmade show program that was made like a Valentine’s card and signed by the cast.
• Props were minimal, though we had some expendables—candy and chocolate for cast and audience, color printing for programs, etc. The prop subtotal was about $250.
• Temp Cupid lost money, in the low four-figures. However, our income met payroll for the cast plus a flat fee for one staffer. What was not wholly compensated was the venue rental fee at The Count’s Den.
  • This was an acceptable loss by both parties (IAC and SDF), and the debt was satisfactorily recompensated. But it would of course have been better if we had a profit.
• Marketing
  • Reached out to/sent press release to:
    • 17 traditional local media outlets; we had replies from two bloggers and Everything Immersive/No Proscenium.
    • 37 sororities at local universities and college – 0 replies
    • Dozens of Meetup.com groups for events, only two replies, one very nasty that revealed what I call “The Meetup Mafia” that controls multiple groups. The other resulted in the group posting the event.
  • Frequent posts to the IAC mailing list
  • Posts to the SDF mailing list
  • Posts to our Instagram and Facebook accounts
  • Posts to the few Discord groups we are in
  • Posts from our cast to their friends and family
  • Printed postcards in the downtown area + The Roguelike Tavern, Geeky Teas & Games, etc.

The Reviews

We didn’t get many reviews, but Noah Nelson of No Proscenium said “It’s wild fun” and would like to see the show pop-up again. (Review here, scroll down). We only heard good comments—often really high praise—from the audience members who stuck around afterwards. But again, we didn’t do a formal feedback process, so all we can say is that if anyone didn’t like it, they didn’t tell us.

There is a video recap and interviews with cast and us from Halloween Every Night here, but it is not a critique.

The Mistakes

• Charged too much for tickets. Instead of $65 General Admission/$85 VIP, it should have been $50 GA (no drinks) and $65 VIP (with a drink and the aforementioned perks). We couldn’t go much lower than $50 for a GA ticket; at $40 we would barely make enough to pay the cast for the performances and rehearsal time, and would not be reimbursed for all other expenses. We don’t know where the line is between a dollar figure someone will pay but affordable enough to get plenty of attendees to cover the costs.
  • One thing we did right, though, was embed the additional corporate charges into the final price—tickets were not $65 plus taxes and fees, they were exactly $65, which meant we got about $57 per sale of a general ticket. This was smartly suggested to us by Marlee Delia.
• Started too late on marketing. We began about three weeks before the shows, when we should have announced right after New Year’s Day, or about five weeks before opening night. The art and text should have been going out sooner, at least digitally.
• There was a ticketing issue we weren’t aware of until a few days before opening: the old (2020) Temp Cupid ticketing site was still up, and it was the top Google hit. It showed that tickets were unavailable—because the show closed four years ago—and some people thought we were sold out. We were using a different ticket service this round, and for SEO reasons we don’t comprehend, the old site topped the new. We added new text to the old show to direct viewers, but the listing couldn’t be removed.
• When we cancelled a second show on one night (not enough sales), I did not tell the cast until after the first show, thinking the bad news might affect performance. But transparency and openness with cast should be paramount.

The Good

I don’t think we made many errors with the show itself, i.e., the content, staging, etc. Some things could have been improved with small adjustments, but overall we are happy with what happened on stage, and very proud of our cast, crew, volunteers, and the efforts of the IAC, especially executive director Rachel Adams. 

Limbo! Autopsy

This is the seventh time we have run Limbo!, though only the second time through Spectacular Disaster Factory for profit. It was run for one night at The Roguelike Tavern in Burbank; we booked the entire bar from 8pm to close at 1am, but the event ended around midnight.

The Numbers

• Two volunteers who were fed—thanks to MC Shawn Crosby and Demon Dealer Michael DiNardo. 

• • The waitstaff and door personnel were provided by The Roguelike.
• The max capacity for attendees was about 85.
• Kirsten wrote 61 characters, one for each attendee.
  • Three did not show, so 58 participants (our largest single group for one of our events so far).
• Our deal with The Roguelike involved hitting a minimum bar tab (I can’t say how much). We asked each attendee to purchase at least two things off the menu. We did not meet that amount, so SDF paid the difference.
• We raised just over $1000 through a Kickstarter campaign for tickets; some of that came from friends and family who supported us but could not attend (thanks, mom!).
  • About a third of the attendees were friends of ours and/or returning Limbo! players.
    
  • A few people bought tickets after the KS campaign closed.
• Tickets ranged between $15-$20 per person, the lower price was for group discounts (cheaper per person to buy a pair or four).
• Since we have already run Limbo! multiple times, our prop costs were low—about $80, and half of that was for leis we didn’t need because we had leftovers from the last run and forgot to check.
• Limbo! made about $200 net profit (whee!).
• Marketing
  • Our SDF website and mailing list, Facebook group, etc.
  • Discord posts
  • The Roguelike Tavern also put us on the calendar and sent some posts for us.
  • Overall, this was much less outreach than Temp Cupid.

The Reviews

We didn’t have any formal reviews; we invited NoPro but they understandably didn’t show. Almost a half-dozen participants left early, though one was for personal reasons. We are not sure why the others did, but assume they were not enjoying the experience.

Again, the comments we heard were positive for the most part. Some people expected, or wanted, something else. There were a few suggestions for changes, but they seemed to be of the “want to make this even better” type than “correcting a flaw” type. But perhaps that’s a misinterpretation. 

The Mistakes

Kirsten spent a lot of time working on and altering AI-generated concept art for our Kickstarter. Most of this decision was due to not having a lot of rights-cleared images from previous runs, and the rest being that AI art is genuinely terrible and falls neatly into the worldbuilding for Limbo! – where everything is familiar and awful, like Paul Anka’s cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, so OF COURSE AI art! 

However, AI art is anathema to some people, including a few followers of the Roguelike Tavern. Hours after we launched our Kickstarter—fully disclosing that some AI generated art was inspirational, not made to represent what anything would look like at the event unless someone costumed that way—we got a message from the Roguelike stating that people were complaining. We tried to take down the AI art, but couldn’t get all of it due to KS restrictions, nor could we un-declare that AI art was involved. We instead cancelled the campaign, even though a few people already donated. Kirsten quickly whipped up some basic text art (with public domain fonts and clip art) and we relaunched.

You can see the original cancelled campaign, with some AI in it, here. The final, successful campaign is here.

There were many little things we could have done better on Limbo!, but here are the two we think mattered most:

• Characters could have used another review for connections and making sure the language in one character matched that of their counterpart.
  • Some of the plot threads could have been tightened or a little more developed.

• Our description of the event and setting participant expectations could also have been improved, but we are unsure how to best do that. More about this aspect at the bottom of this post.

We ranked this seventh run of Limbo! in the middle of all of them—not the best, but neither the worst.

The Good

It was the right call to crowdfund, which we saw was utilized well from our friends at Last Call Theatre. We are likely to use Kickstarter funding again, which is the ransom model of production.

We also think our ticket prices were just about right for this event; we heard from a few people that the price worked for their budget, and others said it was low. This worked to our advantage, we think, because participant expectations were lower with the lower price tag. Since this event was almost entirely dependent on the participants themselves, charging less than $20 (but requiring them to purchase food and drink) was the correct call. True, if we charged a little bit more, or maybe asked everyone to buy three things, we would have made that bar tab and a bit more profit, but nevertheless, we are pleased that we didn’t lose money.

Takeaways

Based on these two 2024 shows, here’s what we are ruminating about:

Marketing

This appears to us to be our biggest weakness, but we also think it’s commonplace in the immersive industry; Disney + Star Wars (Galactic Starcruiser), Evermore Park, Meow Wolf, etc., have also suffered closings and setbacks.

• How can we explain what our show is in a 140 character Tweet or a small Facebook ad? One of the participants at Temp Cupid attended because they knew me, but had no idea what an immersive show was nor anything about games or rules. About 10 minutes in, they “got it” and ended up having a wonderful time. How do we let someone know they might have an awesome experience before they buy a ticket, especially if they haven’t encountered immersive theater?
• Who do we target our ads to besides the immersive community?
• When should marketing start for a show? When should tickets go on sale?
• Is our track record too slight, are we an unknown quantity, or a known quantity yet poor-quality company?

Company Branding

Do we need to improve our branding?

• Should we stick with one genre, say, ghostly shows, or is immersive experiences enough of an identity for the company?
• Are we cultivating our existing audience? Do we need more announcements, more blog entries, more events, more contact with our fans (you)?
• I have some thoughts on a fan base that I will write about later—probably much later.

Length of Runs

For Temp Cupid, should we have done a longer run, with more shows? Or a single night pop-up, like Limbo? With paid rehearsals for cast, though, we needed a certain number of shows to recoup those sunken costs.

Cast Size

Our first run of Cupid had a cast of six. We had one more this year, expecting a larger audience. But big casts are costly—we lost a small fortune on our 33-member cast of Give Up the Ghost in 2019. We think for Cupid a smaller cast, say three or for four actors, would reduce the quality of the show.

What else?

What are we missing or mistaking?

What did we do wrong?

What did we do right?

Please tell us in the comments or message me. If you did not have a good time at either Temp Cupid or Limbo!, we would like to hear about it.

We’d especially like to know if:

• You would have liked to go to Temp Cupid or Limbo!, but you didn’t hear about it.
• You heard about both shows, but don’t like our shows or this kind of show.
• You heard about the shows but could not afford a ticket.
• You heard about shows and wanted to go, but were unavailable for other reasons.

Thank you for reading!