Yesterday, I made the recommendation that the Screenings department be discontinued. Kristin and Matt agreed. Ultimately I couldn't put together a program that met the vision for the convention, within the available resources. We could have cobbled together something really basic, but the effort/benefit ratio just wasn't there. So, time to declare victory and move on.
I am sorry to hear that but glad you gave it a good effort anyway. Now if you could team up with Games on film at MAGFest to improve it even more that would be awesome.
You guys got a sponsorship from Crunchyroll and can't get screenings together? seems like a no brainer to just ask Crunchyroll for a bunch of anime permissions :-p
Also everything's super behind this year. I was ready to open panel submissions in November. I wanted to finish the panel schedule (sans guests) by March...
Crunchyroll is awesome. Their "sponsorship" program let us screen whatever we could stream from their site. We did a lot of that last year. But Rym's right, you need a room, and reliable networking with reasonably high data rate, and a good screen/projector or TV.
Generally speaking, it's hard to defend Screenings departments at conventions if all they're doing is showing videos which are either commercially or illegally available online. There's a good case to be made for annotated videos (people doing riff tracks essentially, or expert commentary), but that is a whole different set of work, because the properties that excellent people want to annotate is not always easy to find permissions for.
You guys got a sponsorship from Crunchyroll and can't get screenings together? seems like a no brainer to just ask Crunchyroll for a bunch of anime permissions :-p
That requires reliable network which we couldn't get a guarantee of.
I might tweak and test for a day or two before I widely publicize that they're live. But yeah, go nuts. Let me know if you run into any problems with the new back-end.
They would consult us if we were willing to deal with anything above our current station. Do you really, truly want to have any part of anything above or outside of panels, workshops, and special events? ;^)
No. No you do not. It eats away your insides, and if you're not strong, it will do away with you completely.
Is the lack of attention/budget (if I'm reading correctly) for panels and screenings and such have to do with the bigger focus on celebrity guests? It seems like they're trying to go in more of a Comic Con style direction. That seems already pretty represented locally and quasi-locally, though. I like Connecticon's diversity of content more than I like bigger names to get autographs from.
I admit that I haven't got a lot of basis for comparison as CT-Con is really our only con (we're changing that next year), but it seems to me like for the diversity of content that's present, it's not so expensive. I see people complaining all the time about the admission price, though. Is CT-Con really that expensive especially given that it's in CT? I mean for con-goers.
The convention center alone has got to seriously cost. I remember it being $100 to rent an electrical outlet when we did the Artist Colony a few years back.
I had a crazy idea for a panel that requires funny reliable people who haven't seen Utena. I just need one more person to fill the panel. Does anyone here fit that bill?
Comments
Also everything's super behind this year. I was ready to open panel submissions in November. I wanted to finish the panel schedule (sans guests) by March...
Generally speaking, it's hard to defend Screenings departments at conventions if all they're doing is showing videos which are either commercially or illegally available online. There's a good case to be made for annotated videos (people doing riff tracks essentially, or expert commentary), but that is a whole different set of work, because the properties that excellent people want to annotate is not always easy to find permissions for.
Side question: would my 3 hour hardcore Nerd Music panel be too long or should I cap it at the hour hour mark when submitting it.
I have no opinion of the new back-end.
This year will be fine, but it's a contraction from last year. Wait until better harvests.
Most likely, Scott will be in charge of wrangling all of you. That means re-upping, hotels, schedule at-con, duties, logistics, etc...
I'll be 100% ignoring that to focus on inter-departmental stuff, panel scheduling, materiel (banner schedules, streaming equipment, etc...).
The convention center alone has got to seriously cost. I remember it being $100 to rent an electrical outlet when we did the Artist Colony a few years back.
But shit sucks.