I take part in a lot of amateur theatre as a hobby. I've always enjoyed acting since I was young. I was in a stage school as kid and teen, I joined the theatre society at my university, and have kept up with it into my grown adult life. In that time I've been in Hamlet, Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus just to name a few of the Shakespeare plays I've been involved with as well as taking part in some original pieces written by friends. I've gotten involved with a few different theatre groups in my local area and it's been a great experience. With that, I came up with the idea of a unified website specifically for amateur theatre. I envisioned a website that would list a bunch of theatre groups that were near to my location, or events such as shows or auditions that a person could go to. This idea came about after discussing with my friends about how there wasn't really a website for it, just Facebook and Google to search for places. One other issue I often saw occurring was friends involved in production teams for shows would often have to message around to try and find somebody who could do a certain tech role or take over a job last minute. I imagined a website where people who could do those jobs and wanted to get involved could sort of 'advertise' themselves as being available or theatre groups could put out calls for this that people could see. That's where I got the idea for Act Reel.

Facebook and Google can be great resources for amateur theatre, but they are also very broad. I was inspired heavily by LinkedIn which fills the niche of 'professionals'. LinkedIn is entirely focused on people wanting to develop their careers and professional network. I pictured a website that covered the niche of amateur theatre. In fact, on of the taglines I use when discussing it with others is that it's like 'LinkedIn for amateur theatre'. After discussing it with others, it soon became clear that this was an idea with promise. My firneds who I'd met through theatre all said it would be a great help and something they could see themselves using. So, with the idea in mind I got to it.

I figured that this was something I could just build myself. I am a software developer after all. At this point I'd had a lot of experience with front end technologies, particularly Angular. Having that experience gave me the confidence to build this as a solo project. The initial scope of this project was that users could go on and view theatre groups and events based on location. If they then wanted to, they could create an account that would let then let them create their own groups and events, connect with others in theatre that they know and to discuss their experiences.

The scope soon grew from their. I added in theatre member features so that users could keep track of their group's members, a 'projects' feature that allows users to organise the casts of any shows or events they may be running, talk with them, organise schedules for things like rehearsals, and even carry out video calls in case online rehearsals or meetings are needed. Users can also create a calendar for their group and feature many different types of events that others can see and follow along with.

In upcoming posts I'll be discussing the code and decisions that went into the development of this website. I'll talk about how the project is layed out and why I did things in a certain way. My next post will go over the reasoning behind the tech stack I opted for. I look forward to sharing this with you.