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absolutedestinyThis is a four part con review. Part 1 looks at what I was doing work-wise for the con, part 2 talks about the panels and shows in general, part 3 talks about the people and part 4 will be all vid recs. Crazy.
So this was my first year of vividcon where I was on con staff. My god what a lot of work. I can't begin to comprehend how many hours of my life was taken up with vidding stuff this year on top of my currently hectic job.
The short version of this post is "I've been really fucking busy and if you've managed to get any social time with me over the last 6 months then congratulations because I've not had any time for it". Same goes for the con. If I saw you there and we hung out and had fun then count yourself among the lucky few. I was busy. A lot.
Pre-con: Club Vivid
For me, everything started with club vivid. We started the poll in february and asked for april submissions. We got a lot of very good vids to premiere at the con (16 I think) some of which I'll be reccing later. But the new vids aren't enough, there are 3 hours of dancing to put vids to. My partner in crime,sockkpuppett, worked out the majority of the older vids to add and I suggested a number of anime vids that I thought would be fun and some other favourites of mine that had to go in. Then I sat down to organise them into a playlist.
For the first time, Club Vivid was edited together to reduce the gap between songs so that it was much more like a dance club, with non-premiering vids being edited together. I actually took all the vids, stuck them on an Adobe Premiere timeline and edited them together. Those of you that were there, was this an improvement? I heard both positives and negatives at the con and would appreciate any feedback on this in comments. Personally I felt that the gaps in the previous year slowed everything down. Club vivid seemed like it was no time at all this year. I was amazed at how fast those 3 hours went by. I'm going to talk more about CV in a later post about the shows and panels.
Pre-con: vidshows and con dvds
Next came the immense task of putting together all the vidshows. There are a LOT of vids - my nearly full 300gig vividcon HD can testify to this. We prepared the Premieres show first as that had to be sent off to Carol andmelina123 so they could work out the playlist. During most of this time, I was teaching sockkpuppett the more technical parts of dvd authoring and using DVD Maestro and she learned at an incredible pace allowing her to take on the bulk of the shows herself. Putting all those shows together on dvds is a nightmare. Lots of tech issues but we fixed pretty much all the ones that we could (there were others that were unfixable and obviously one or two fell through the cracks as always).
Pre-con: vidding
During this whole time, I'm actually editing like it's going out of fashion. I do not one bu two vids for club vivid and then once the CV authoring is done, I foolishly offer myself up for auction. The auction vid then eats my life with me having to juggle all the different sources and actually having to watch Buffy so I could vid with it. The auction vid takes so long that I dont even get it finished in time, have to put it on hold to get my new Life on Mars video done and finally finish it while helping luminosity with all the vidshows! Auction was pretty much the last show done, for this reason. On one hand I abused my status as vividcon tech to extend my deadline but if I didn't have to be vividcon tech I would have met the deadline, so, I think it's fair :)
I finally get the auction vid finished... but the work isnt over yet, there is still...
Pre-con karaoke
So, I had this crazy idea that after the Premeires show we could do a vidder karaoke where drunken vvc attendees could sing along to vids. The other concom were mostly positive with the idea and so it begun. People were asked in advance what they'd like to sing so I could work out what vids to put lyrics onto. So I got the vids, did the subtitles, reduced the vocals on the songs that could have their vocals reduced (though in hindsight I did this too much on some vids). We had about 26 vids to pick from, which was pretty good for the first year. The actual process of subbing the vids was really easy with only Without Me and La Resistance posing any kind of complication.
Pre-con panel
There was no pre con panel prep. See, there was going to be but by the time I'd finished doing the dvds for karaoke it was 3am with my flight later that morning. So yeah. No pre-con comedy prep for me. It showed, imo :/
::Ian flies over to Chicago::
Thursday - initial setup and testing
So, the guy from the equipment hire place arrives and he's got pretty much everything we need. He's a decent guy, a rocker, he likes ozzy. There's a considerable lack of cables, imo, but we're going to fix that for next year. We hook up the shiny new dvd players and start testing some stuff out. Things got a lot easier when Carol arrived as I was doing pretty much everything from memory... and as I wasnt doing tech last year my recollections were of a normal atendee. Projector colours end up interesting so we started to tweak. Unfortunately they still suck the next day. This was for two reasons - 1) the main projector was shittier than the panel projector, so we swapped them over friday night, 2) the projector forgot its settings when powered off so all the tweaking we did on thursday night was for naught.
We also tested out the microphones for the karaoke and they were working fine. A little touchy on the feedback but come the night, it wasn't really a problem.
Friday - CV setup and cleanup
This was an interesting problem. We had all sorts of equipment with all sorts of lengths of cables and at one point we were worried that we might not be able to show vids on both sides of the room. After a lot of playing around and problem solving, we finally got it set up but it was fairly ghetto and we had to basically move everything. Cleanup was also pretty time consuming as we had to test out the two projectors. By this point I was really tired and was missing out on all the fun party stuff. I did at least get to seesisabet perform the Lewis story, so that was good. A big thank you to everyone who helped with setup for club vivid. Right from people who were taping cables, stacking chairs through to people who went and got food for me and Carol. You all rock. The volunteers were all really great this year.
Saturday - Premieres and Karaoke
Things were much better on saturday in terms of setup. The configuration we did the night before lasted us all day. The karoke was easy - we wheeled in the TV from the con suite and plugged in the extra video cable so the singers could read their lyrics. No problem. Quickest setup of the con, really, which was good because we had a long Premieres show this year.
Glitchy Discs
The main stress of Saturday was regarding the premieres show. There had been three glitches on Friday. The novelty show glitched during Detachable Penis and Club Vivid broke my heart when it glitched during Copacabana and we had to skip it and nearly new part 1 wouldn't play at first. Sosockkpuppett and I were really worried about the Premieres show doing the same. So, to be certain, I scanned the discs and burned additional copies. Thankfully the discs were totally fine... but there was another problem. We'd missed a vid. A vid which was asked to be left off the con dvd wasn't included in the premiere dvd because we got all muddled up between the con dvds that we give out and the ones we use for the show.
Now weirdly, I prefer this kind of emergency. This is something I can handle. I was told about the problem during the break in the Premieres show and I ran back to my room and was able to burn a dvd containing only that one missing vid, so we could show it at the start of the 2nd half. This was the whole reason I brought as much tech with me as I did. It was a really quick fix and we were able to show the vid. No problem.
Of course, the glitchy discs had me on edge the whole con - right the way up until the challenge and auction show. The auction show particularly because people had PAID for these vids and mine was one of them. I was so tense during that show, thinking that things would screw up... but everything went fine and I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. Next year, we test the discs more thoroughly so I dont die of a heart attack during the con.
Sunday cleanup
This was actually fun for me as I was able to finally truly relax. A lot of people helped put stuff away and it was a good time to decompress. I had a much better time with the winding down this year than I did last. There was a real sense of completeness and achievement for me... the feeling of a job well done. It was incredibly satisfying and I was on a high for days after, even through the sad goodbyes.
Obviously there will be a lot of things done differently next year, but it's all a learning experience. Until then!
So this was my first year of vividcon where I was on con staff. My god what a lot of work. I can't begin to comprehend how many hours of my life was taken up with vidding stuff this year on top of my currently hectic job.
The short version of this post is "I've been really fucking busy and if you've managed to get any social time with me over the last 6 months then congratulations because I've not had any time for it". Same goes for the con. If I saw you there and we hung out and had fun then count yourself among the lucky few. I was busy. A lot.
Pre-con: Club Vivid
For me, everything started with club vivid. We started the poll in february and asked for april submissions. We got a lot of very good vids to premiere at the con (16 I think) some of which I'll be reccing later. But the new vids aren't enough, there are 3 hours of dancing to put vids to. My partner in crime,
sockkpuppett, worked out the majority of the older vids to add and I suggested a number of anime vids that I thought would be fun and some other favourites of mine that had to go in. Then I sat down to organise them into a playlist.For the first time, Club Vivid was edited together to reduce the gap between songs so that it was much more like a dance club, with non-premiering vids being edited together. I actually took all the vids, stuck them on an Adobe Premiere timeline and edited them together. Those of you that were there, was this an improvement? I heard both positives and negatives at the con and would appreciate any feedback on this in comments. Personally I felt that the gaps in the previous year slowed everything down. Club vivid seemed like it was no time at all this year. I was amazed at how fast those 3 hours went by. I'm going to talk more about CV in a later post about the shows and panels.
Pre-con: vidshows and con dvds
Next came the immense task of putting together all the vidshows. There are a LOT of vids - my nearly full 300gig vividcon HD can testify to this. We prepared the Premieres show first as that had to be sent off to Carol and
melina123 so they could work out the playlist. During most of this time, I was teaching sockkpuppett the more technical parts of dvd authoring and using DVD Maestro and she learned at an incredible pace allowing her to take on the bulk of the shows herself. Putting all those shows together on dvds is a nightmare. Lots of tech issues but we fixed pretty much all the ones that we could (there were others that were unfixable and obviously one or two fell through the cracks as always).Pre-con: vidding
During this whole time, I'm actually editing like it's going out of fashion. I do not one bu two vids for club vivid and then once the CV authoring is done, I foolishly offer myself up for auction. The auction vid then eats my life with me having to juggle all the different sources and actually having to watch Buffy so I could vid with it. The auction vid takes so long that I dont even get it finished in time, have to put it on hold to get my new Life on Mars video done and finally finish it while helping luminosity with all the vidshows! Auction was pretty much the last show done, for this reason. On one hand I abused my status as vividcon tech to extend my deadline but if I didn't have to be vividcon tech I would have met the deadline, so, I think it's fair :)
I finally get the auction vid finished... but the work isnt over yet, there is still...
Pre-con karaoke
So, I had this crazy idea that after the Premeires show we could do a vidder karaoke where drunken vvc attendees could sing along to vids. The other concom were mostly positive with the idea and so it begun. People were asked in advance what they'd like to sing so I could work out what vids to put lyrics onto. So I got the vids, did the subtitles, reduced the vocals on the songs that could have their vocals reduced (though in hindsight I did this too much on some vids). We had about 26 vids to pick from, which was pretty good for the first year. The actual process of subbing the vids was really easy with only Without Me and La Resistance posing any kind of complication.
Pre-con panel
There was no pre con panel prep. See, there was going to be but by the time I'd finished doing the dvds for karaoke it was 3am with my flight later that morning. So yeah. No pre-con comedy prep for me. It showed, imo :/
::Ian flies over to Chicago::
Thursday - initial setup and testing
So, the guy from the equipment hire place arrives and he's got pretty much everything we need. He's a decent guy, a rocker, he likes ozzy. There's a considerable lack of cables, imo, but we're going to fix that for next year. We hook up the shiny new dvd players and start testing some stuff out. Things got a lot easier when Carol arrived as I was doing pretty much everything from memory... and as I wasnt doing tech last year my recollections were of a normal atendee. Projector colours end up interesting so we started to tweak. Unfortunately they still suck the next day. This was for two reasons - 1) the main projector was shittier than the panel projector, so we swapped them over friday night, 2) the projector forgot its settings when powered off so all the tweaking we did on thursday night was for naught.
We also tested out the microphones for the karaoke and they were working fine. A little touchy on the feedback but come the night, it wasn't really a problem.
Friday - CV setup and cleanup
This was an interesting problem. We had all sorts of equipment with all sorts of lengths of cables and at one point we were worried that we might not be able to show vids on both sides of the room. After a lot of playing around and problem solving, we finally got it set up but it was fairly ghetto and we had to basically move everything. Cleanup was also pretty time consuming as we had to test out the two projectors. By this point I was really tired and was missing out on all the fun party stuff. I did at least get to see
sisabet perform the Lewis story, so that was good. A big thank you to everyone who helped with setup for club vivid. Right from people who were taping cables, stacking chairs through to people who went and got food for me and Carol. You all rock. The volunteers were all really great this year.Saturday - Premieres and Karaoke
Things were much better on saturday in terms of setup. The configuration we did the night before lasted us all day. The karoke was easy - we wheeled in the TV from the con suite and plugged in the extra video cable so the singers could read their lyrics. No problem. Quickest setup of the con, really, which was good because we had a long Premieres show this year.
Glitchy Discs
The main stress of Saturday was regarding the premieres show. There had been three glitches on Friday. The novelty show glitched during Detachable Penis and Club Vivid broke my heart when it glitched during Copacabana and we had to skip it and nearly new part 1 wouldn't play at first. So
sockkpuppett and I were really worried about the Premieres show doing the same. So, to be certain, I scanned the discs and burned additional copies. Thankfully the discs were totally fine... but there was another problem. We'd missed a vid. A vid which was asked to be left off the con dvd wasn't included in the premiere dvd because we got all muddled up between the con dvds that we give out and the ones we use for the show.Now weirdly, I prefer this kind of emergency. This is something I can handle. I was told about the problem during the break in the Premieres show and I ran back to my room and was able to burn a dvd containing only that one missing vid, so we could show it at the start of the 2nd half. This was the whole reason I brought as much tech with me as I did. It was a really quick fix and we were able to show the vid. No problem.
Of course, the glitchy discs had me on edge the whole con - right the way up until the challenge and auction show. The auction show particularly because people had PAID for these vids and mine was one of them. I was so tense during that show, thinking that things would screw up... but everything went fine and I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. Next year, we test the discs more thoroughly so I dont die of a heart attack during the con.
Sunday cleanup
This was actually fun for me as I was able to finally truly relax. A lot of people helped put stuff away and it was a good time to decompress. I had a much better time with the winding down this year than I did last. There was a real sense of completeness and achievement for me... the feeling of a job well done. It was incredibly satisfying and I was on a high for days after, even through the sad goodbyes.
Obviously there will be a lot of things done differently next year, but it's all a learning experience. Until then!
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 03:44 am (UTC)I mean, I knew that the concom works very hard for us all and I knew you ended up with a big chunk of it but...
Dang!
Please don't have a heart attack. And thank you!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 04:16 am (UTC)You are amazing. Thank you so, so much.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 05:41 am (UTC)When I'm dancing I get really angry when a song cuts out early. It's one of the reasons my club vivid vid was 2:30 last year, and not the 2 minutes I later cut it down to for online distribution. If things are edited together this is less of a problem. The shorter vids can just run together and I don't feel all herky jerky. It takes me awhile to find the groove and just relax, and I need to know where the next beat is coming from.
Thanks for the insane amount of work you did. It was a great con.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 02:01 pm (UTC)Well done, sir, well done! =D
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 04:10 pm (UTC)Re your question about CV, I loved the way the vids flowed into one another this year. It definitely made a difference. Maybe not a *huge* one, but it was noticeable. And I appreciated the artistry that went into the way the vids were faded into one another, and the order in which you put them together.
I am so greatful to you, and the whole concom, for doing so much great work for us. It's the best-run con I've ever been to or even heard about. But I hope next year is easier on you!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 10:24 pm (UTC)sounds like the payoff was worth it though. congratulations on a job well done. looking forward to seeing you again in atlanta.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:20 pm (UTC)Also, allow me to second the voices calling for piling truffles, or nice vodka, or something precious and tasty, at your feet. :-)