After accepting the role, it was up to us to build a team. The teams in Lunar Gala are built around specific parts of the show: Design, Modeling, PR, Entertainment, and Tech. We restructured the teams to better fit how we worked as producers. Each team varied in size and had several roles. We created a board of 36 members, who would take on different roles from autioning models to owning social media.

Lunar Gala was created in 1996 in celebration of the Lunar New year. Every year, the show theme is sparked from the Chinese zodiac animal for the year. More often than not the theme strays from the initial idea, but embodies the spirit of that animal. For example, the 2015 theme was "Vestige," or the feeling of something left behind, sparked from the practice of goat sacrifice. The theme for 2013, "Venin" was more explicit, with its ties to snake venom.

For our year, we chose the theme: Strain for the year of the Monkey. This was inspired by our human evolutionary ties to primates. We started off with ideas of origin, lineage, and mutation. Ultimately, we settled on the word “Strain,” liking its multiple meanings. One as a biological strain, or genetic variant, another, the stress and force one puts on an object or self, and finally, the separation of types of matter to refine something. Together these three meanings embodied our theme for the show.

“Strain is the evolution of a form over time from the application of external forces – pressure, tension, and constriction. Strain is the struggle of an organism to survive. Through the past twenty years of growth, Lunar Gala has strained to evolve beyond the usual, the accepted, the proper, and will continue to do so for years to come.”

We followed three "brands" throughout the year. One as the early branding for the twentieth year that embodied the celebration of the anniversary, one as the branding for Lunar Gala: Strain, and finally, the general Lunar Gala Brand that illustrates the personality of the organization.

Strain: The Strain branding was the most important and most developed, as it was the theme for the 2016 show. This branding was incorporated into promotional videos, videos in the show, posters, social media photos, magazines, tickets, and more.

We wanted to explore images that we could make on our own, but would embrace both the synthetic and the natural parts of the lunar gala brand and the theme. To do so, we experimented with natural products at a small scale, filming liquids and materials interacting with each other. We used materials like milk, ink, water, ferrofluid, cornstarch, oil, vinegar, and other substances, playing off the hydrophobic and magnetic properties of the materials. This branding continued the use of DIN for consistency with the LG brand, but brought in GT Cinetype as a structured typeface for the brand. Some iterations:

After months of iteration, we decided on several visual elements to follow, such as blurs, connected lines, and outlines. We created the logo for Lunar Gala: Strain, and chose outlined graphics of the images connected by lines. For incorporation with the generic branding, we used the blur to give the audience a feeling of straining to read content.

This branding was used to drive several experiences and print elements, such as our site:

Magazine

Tickets

Posters

For the show itself, we also generated custom backgrounds for our LED wall, which incorporated textural elements from each line with our branding. These were created using the music for each line.

Aside from the theme of the show, Lunar Gala is of course, a fashion show. Because the designers and models are made up of students and not just board members, Lunar Gala spent a large amount of time reviewing portfolios, watching models, and auditioning dancers. An example of Design Portfolios

Throughout the year we released videos behind the scenes of the process

A huge part of my role was the tech setup of the show. As producers, we really wanted Lunar Gala to be thought of as a fashion show, and not as a student performance. The organization has already built up a reputation as one of the most professional shows in the Pittsburgh area, and we really wanted to push its reputation as a professional fashion show.

To focus on the content of the show, we created a simple t shaped stage with an LED wall backdrop. The LED wall enabled quality video behind the runway. We chose to follow fashion shows that we found successful and found that we were drawn to those with clean, white backdrops, drawing even more attention to the content produced by the designers of the show. As a result, we chose to envelope the Weigand gym, surrounding as much as we could in order to take away from the idea of being in a gym. Along those lines, we wanted to immerse the audience, removing any sense of the feeling of being in the gym. By keeping lighting minimal in the audience and using like primarily only through the screens and white lights on the stage, we were able to draw all focus to the stage.

While directing the show is a huge part of being a producer, managing the team is an even larger part of being a producer. Managing the team involves keeping in contact with every team and making sure that all tasks are being done. However a team of 3 managing a team of over a hundred students often means needing to know every single detail and deadline at any given moment. It also required a lot of work to be done on our own. Because many tasks required a knowledge of all teams, the producers needed to take on every role that involved deliverables from all teams. As a result, we learned to delegate and manage as much as we could.

We tried to treat Lunar Gala more as the student organization that it should be, rather than the business that it often turns out to be. We began to incorporate more fun into practices and meetings, adding events like a trash bag fashion show -- aiming to have fun while being productive.

From the show:

Miriam Buchwald
Jibby Ani

+ many more