First week of October 2024, right in time for the school holidays and against a backdrop of typical drizzly spring weather, The Lyric Theatre transformed into a sci-fi battleground - a 4-day laser tag event - the first of it’s kind in our region.
Then the crowds of little people arrived…
4 months of planning around the dates, traffic management, game flow, marketing and data capture resulted in a series of 2 back-to-back events daily over the course of 4 days that were full to capacity, engaging for participants, incident-free as well as low cost - the perfect school holiday activity for families, children and teenagers.
From the initial concept phase of this venture, The Lyric Theatre team concluded the best way for this event to genuinely cater to the needs of a younger audience, would involve the direct influence of youth in the planning, marketing and eventual operation.
With the benefit of an extension in the funding application dealine we were able to secure the commitment of Youth voice kawatiri Council in Westport.
Over a series of weeks leading up to the event, our team meet fortnightly with the Youth Voice Kawatiri Council. The group were able to vote and resolve the many moving parts of this activity and by the time the dates arrived, were well-placed to cover the full operation, shared in shifts across their team.
Highlighted at an early stage of planning, transport access has been a key limitation to travelling between Westport-Granity and we were delighted when Kathy of Buller Taxis agreed to charter a bus and provide a dedicated driver for twice daily return trips in conjunction with our event.
We agreed to further subsidise the fees of this service to make it further accessible to the community with a small allocation of our funding dedicated to travel costs.
Unfortunately, though well promoted, this was not supported by members of the community and when no one showed up to the bus stop for a second day we make the decision to cancel this service, to mitigate any further accrual of costs.
We were blown away when Kathy then offered to scrap the bus charter and driver fees for the lost time, The theatre is incredibly fortunate to have such meaningful support and we look forward to working with Buller Taxis to put together a transport solution that will be sustainable (and supported) in future.
The unique poster artwork for this event was the result of a contest we promoted early in the planning stages. The brief was for someone to create an image that showed what laser tag might look like to them, perhaps on another planet. We received several entries, all of them were uniquely creative but the entry from Scarlet Lisseman (age 9) from Granity, depicting battle between human soldiers and robots teamed up with aliens really captured our imagination.
The 4-day event culminated with a Battle Royale advanced mode for the hardcore fans on the Saturday evening.
Top 2 players from each round made it into a semi final and the top scorers from these rounds faced-off in a 10 minute adrenaline-fuelled shoot-out.
Results:
First Place - Hans
Second Place - Zeppelin
This event was made possible by funding from Sport Tasman’s Tu Manawa fund, operated by Youth Voice Kawatiri and with support from Buller Taxis, Buller REAP, Granity School, West Coast Messenger, MOVE Transport, Rainbow Cake Kitchen and Granity Volunteer Fire Brigade.