The biggest event of the school year was back with a bang in 2018
Annalisse Crosswell, Associate News Editor // Photo courtesy of Yats Palat
Captivate graced Capilano University’s Cedar Courtyard for the first time in 2017. The event was the first of its kind offered to students, but its cost raised a few eyebrows. This year students and faculty had a better idea of what to expect, as did Yats Palat (vice president student life and member of the Events and Outreach Committee) and the team organizing the University’s biggest event of the year. Blueprint also returned to Captivate this year as co-producers.
Captivate boasted music and a beer garden as it had last year, as well as the addition of a photo booth, jumbo-sized Jenga, food trucks and an after-party hosted at The Charles Bar in Gastown. The setup also differed from last year in that the stage was relocated to the designated smoking area.
The biggest difference that students will have noticed, however, is the open beer garden that utilized a wristband system for those that wished to drink. On this change Palat said, “That was really, really, really important to me … because I wanted everybody to feel included. I didn’t want to separate the beer garden and the non-beer garden.”
Though the Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) has yet to sit down with Blueprint to debrief and talk turnout, Palat said there were close to 400 wristbands given out at the event and 80 students went on to attend the after-party. “It was a really rainy day,” said Palat, “and I actually thought that it would almost shut down the event or we’d have only a few people of maybe 100, but we had tons of people.”
Students who simply wanted to sit and relax at the event left because of the rain, but the students that wanted to dance and enjoy the music were not deterred, many of whom stayed the whole time. Students that went on to The Charles Bar stayed until the bitter end, continuing until the bar closed at 1 am.
Palat said the event organization passed with few issues, and no more stress than event planning usually incurs. The only issue that arose was the organization of the food trucks, and the fact that a few of them had cancelled at the last minute. Despite the changes this year, the fact that this event had been organized once before by Palat made the process easier, as did this year’s team of Blueprint staff. According to Palat even the liquor inspector was helpful in formulating a plan for the open setup.
Unlike last year, the event did not come at a cost of 80 per cent of the Events and Outreach budget. Knowing the event would be costly going into planning, the team had an allocated budget, put aside last year, for big events such as this. Of the $22,000 budget for Captivate, approximately $21,600 was spent – this coming out of a $38,000 budget for events during the 2018-19 academic year.
After the successful planning and execution of this event, the University has now asked the CSU to plan a similar event at the beginning of the Spring semester called CapRocks. For this event the University will give the CSU a $30,000 budget that is not associated with their personal events budget.
“This is the only real opportunity [students] get on such a large scale to enjoy themselves and drink and dance,” said Palat, who considers the event to be a huge success.