Students needing a break from the stress of finals will have a chance to relax this weekend thanks to a handful of students from Freeman Hall.

Six bands will converge in the Forker parking lot Saturday for a student-run concert. The event will host six bands, including nationally touring Motion City Soundtrack.

All of the bands are either completely new to the ISU community or rarely play in the Ames or Des Moines areas.

Four students living in Freeman Hall — Jason Duncan, sophomore in mechanical engineering; Ryan McNair, junior in management information systems; Thomas Shaw, sophomore in mechanical engineering; and Andrew Wake, sophomore in sociology — have planned the entire event.

The concert has been in the works since September, and when planning began, it was the only free music concert in April.

“Many other organizations have stepped up to fill April with live music events, but none to this scale,” McNair says. “The amount of staging and lighting, paired with the quality of bands we’re bringing, makes this the largest free April event, in my opinion.”

The four men on the planning committee split the numerous tasks and have worked out every detail, from having a host for each band to taking pictures for security IDs. The four have been holding weekly meetings since the beginning of September to make sure they cover everything necessary for the concert.

“We split the responsibilities into four areas, and each of us have adapted and stepped up to get things done,” McNair says.

Finding and booking talent for the show took the longest, he says.

“After you have a date set, the next step is to find a band that can play it,” McNair says.

Shaw put many hours of work into contacting booking agents and carefully selecting the bands for the festival. This included going over numerous contracts and editing out requirements like “two bags of corn tortilla chips and a jar of mild salsa waiting in our dressing room.”

“I contacted over 30 bands between November and February,” Shaw says. “After deciding on hosting a rock festival, we started looking at bands in our price range. With increased funding from all over the residence halls and Iowa State in general, we were able to book nationally touring bands.”

Organizing a concert of this size, which McNair says is expected to draw 2,000 people, is no simple task.

“There are many hurdles we have had to jump through to comply with university requirements, but everyone we have worked with has been really excited about what we’re doing,” Wake says.

Wake has gathered and organized a staff of more than 60 student volunteers and ISU security officers to help with security, set-up, tear-down and other tasks during the concert to ensure the event runs smoothly and everyone has a positive experience.

McNair created all of the advertising and submitted bills to the residence hall associations and applied for various grants to fund the concert. He has also come up with creative ways to distribute ads, like gluing them to pizza box deliveries and handing out flyers to people on Welch Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights.

“While the four of us have our separate tasks, we work very well as a team to help each other out whenever possible,” he says.

The concept of a free annual event began last year when the men of Freeman hosted a successful free cookout catered by Hickory Park for residence hall students.

“At the beginning of last school year, Freeman Hall became an all-male hall,” McNair says. “After various residents caused problems within the residence hall department, our houses decided we needed to do something to show good faith for our fellow dormmates.”

“This year has been much better than last year living in Freeman,” Wake says. “Entering the fall semester with a strong and organized cabinet helped. Everyone is a lot more laid back this year.”

Because of the strong leadership this year in Freeman, the men knew they would be able to create a larger venue.

“This year we wanted to hold a similar event [to last year], but we started thinking on a much larger scale,” says Shaw.

Post-meeting brainstorming has already produced ideas for a campuswide paintball tournament next year to feature the ISU Paintball Club.

“We hope to continue this tradition in years to come, but it’s hard to tell if people will put in the effort required to make an event of this scale succeed,” Duncan says. “[Through organizations at Iowa State] the funds are there. The problem comes in finding people to take on the responsibility of organizing large-scale events like our concert.”