Con Report - Discon III
[aaargh this post has crashed 3 times and I keep rewriting it and it keeps crashing so maybe it's not as coherent as its first version was].
Home from "Discon ai-ai-ai!" aka CurseCon aka The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I had an amazing time of it. For me it involved working with awesome people on accomplishing awesome things, if sometimes under less than ideal conditions, but this is absolutely what I signed up for.
Kudos and thanks forever to my intrepid Assistant Lighting Designer, without whom I could have done none of it.
I worked through the Monday, and therefore missed the bulk of load-in and rigging of the lights in the main ballroom, which was done largely by our supplier. (Shout-out to Atmosphere Lighting of Silver Spring, who have been consistently awesome.)
Tuesday's commute was made much more pleasant by sharing it with Larry. The first order of business was to get collections of road cases from the main ballroom to their respective rooms.
You might have heard of the hotel's notorious inaccessibility - they weren't exactly about ease of wheeled mobility in 1930, and the hotel has been updated to the minimal-est possible standard of compliance since. Most of the function rooms are positioned in cute but utterly confounding half-levels from each other, and navigating them via public hallways strained the definition of access. Navigating through the hotel's non-public areas with freight elevators involved traversing intricate warrens of ups and downs and twists and turns. It was physically exhausting and surprisingly exhilarating. There was something viscerally communal about the exercise. I did find my limits on attempting to move the lighting supplier's crates up a ramp, perhaps not impressing him.
Much of the rest of the day had been spent on assembly of lighting gear and projector screens. This part was made more exciting by the fact that the fire marshals have utterly destroyed our pre-planned room maps (which I thought they had reviewed on paper, but what do I know), and made us revise stage positions and ramps and projector and screen placements. We work with fire marshals _a lot_. We know how to plan for it. Heck, some of the planners are certified in it. This went well above and beyond our experience with such matters in any other city, and beyond published guidelines we'd tried to adhere to. I've later read that this rendered some of the rooms inaccessible to their panelists. Apologies were sent, I hear, but of course too late to help or to move the panels. This _sucks_, and my sympathies go to them, and I can't think of a single darn thing we could have done to have prevented it.
Lunch involved takeout from A Corner Bakery, of which I could eat the caprese sandwiches, much improved by taking a pair of them and stealing mozzarella and tomato from one to augment the other. Dinner involved individual containers of chicken or vegetable soup as well as little sandwich rolls. On later days turkey no cheese started to exist, but on the build day the only option that did not involve meat and cheese was really terrible hummus with a sprig of arugula on a gluten-free roll. It was awful.
Before heading out Larry and I spent some time measuring the stage and marking out wing locations for pipe and drape that I needed in place to be able to do focus the lights the day after. (Almost all of my lights were movers, which is awesome for not needing to go up to the lights to point them towards the stage at the cost of spending some time teaching each light where the stage is.)
Spouse was able to take the day off work, so we rode in together. I volunteered to stage manage the opening ceremonies, so once setup was complete and I could point my ALD and Chris the Wonderful Lighting Vendor Dude towards teaching the lights to be on the stage, my job became bouncing between assorted ceremony participants in an attempt to ascertain that they had what they needed.
This was made rather more challenging by the participation of the con chair, who promptly disappeared to a division head meeting, as well as some high school students who were not slated to turn up into an hour after the allegedly scheduled rehearsal. But the MC, Ulysses E. Campbell, proved an utter delight to work and intermittently chat with. To be fair the con chair - aka the author Mary Robinette Kowal - was pretty also delightful when she finally turned up again.
The convention invited Duke Ellington School for the Arts to participate in the proceedings, so the ceremony included an honor guard display and a show choir. This last proved a bit perplexing, as their set list had not been pre-confirmed - the choir was not asked to do a selection from their existing repertoire, but evidently there was no follow-up to determine what that might be. Which started with a wintry seasonal tune, veered into a rather less secular carol, and concluded with an entirely non-Christmas-related piece about worshipping Jesus. The students were enthusiastic and artistic, and I would have enjoyed the performances in many other contexts, but there was communication pertaining to knowing one's audience that did not happen here and a number of fans reported feeling out of place. I understand ConCom became aware of it and were discussing it, but I'm not sure what conclusions, if any, they arrived at, and I've not seen any Twitter tweetery. Upon much consideration I concluded that I am best off treating it as an example of local DC culture.
The school also had a half-dozen theater students to volunteer for tech, which greatly helped with our staffing shortage. They helped run tech and streaming in the panel rooms, worked the cameras and the spotlights for some of the events, helped with house and backstage operations, and were enthusiastic and helpful. They seemed to enjoy our love of what we do, the rapidly tangible results, and the fact that we treated them much as we would any other new volunteers. I am hoping we have tempted their supervising adult into bringing a student contingent out for Costume Con.
With the ceremony out of the way I took the occasion to buy my ALD dinner at Umi Sushi. The pickup took 30 minutes instead of 20 and lacked one of the ordered rolls, but the food was tasty, which renders it a better option than the adjacent Tono Sushi, which our friends reviewed as friendly but unbearably bland.
The evening was concluded at Ex_Smof's Scotch party, for which he'd gotten an enormously large suite. Food was served in one room which required masking, booze was stationed in another, and the parlor and a balcony were designated for hanging out and partaking, which - combined with an exclusive list complete with a name checker at the door - made it an almost-comfortable affair. Said name-checker was a friend of
vvalkyri's, and was an interesting guy to talk to. He expressed interest in helping out, and was quite useful at strike on Sunday.
Thursday was, noteworthily, my first indoor restaurant meal since BeforeTimes. At 7am Open City was sparse enough that occupying a distant corner of it felt almost safe. It has teas that come in kinds, charmingly offers a pair of animal crackers with your tea or coffee, and their breakfasts are decadent - Spouse and I shared a pecan waffle thing and a ricotta-stuffed french toast thing, and both were great.
The big event on Thursday was a concert by Gamer Symphony Orchestra. The Marvelous ALD is a whole lot more into concert lighting than I am, and therefore got that job, which meant that I was largely superfluous for the day and evening except for doing general prep for all the everything else.
One noteworthy item that transpired was that as we were puttering about we smelled smoke in the house. We sniffed every piece of equipment within our reach, determined it was nothing of ours and summoned the hotel electrician. He sniffed around a bit too and suggested that this was because the ballroom has not been in use for four months, and this was dust burning off the lights or from the HVAC vents or something, much like one might smell when one turns on heat or AC in one's car the first time of the season. It seemed like a plausible enough explanation, and the smell dissipated shortly.
Spouse was having a stressful day, so I attempted to take him to the zoo, but it was closed. We settled for knocking about the hotel's spacious gardens area.
At the concert I had originally planned to do cable management for the hand-held camera operator, but as I returned to the ballroom I - for the first time of the week - found it overwhelming.
lonebear was kind enough to offer to step in, and I - having ascertained the house was ready to open and needful communications were happening - slinked off to find dinner. Alas I did not have an opportunity to touch base with
silmaril, who'd been quite busy pre show and whom I did not catch in between one or both of us being occupied.
None of the restaurants offered outdoor seating, but the weather was pleasant, and Eddie's Cafe, the Chinese place across the street, had a handful of utilitarian picnic tables at which one could enjoy their takeout. They were pretty quick and pretty tasty and definitely maximum bang for the buck for anyone who'd not rather be having the Chipotle next door.
I believe this was the evening during which
selki had her lovely little private gathering, which had a number of nifty people. It was fantastic to see her before another round at ex_smof's and adjourning to the tech suite before collapsing.
If there's one event at conventions that I think of as mine it's the Masequerade. There are few things I find as exhilarating as looking at a costume in front of me and throwing together a lighting look to make it its best as quickly as I can.
This requires a whole lot of pre-prep, and the day prior I'd spent a bit of time with Lighting Vendor Chris building the toolkit for me to be fast at building and saving and playing back a costume sequence. The work paid off, and I hope we're as good next time when we do it without a trained professional on hand.
Unfortunately the rehearsal day was not as strenuous as they sometimes are, because we only got to 11 entries. We have gone to quite some lengths to make it awesome. And it was. Just, well, on a half-a-Balticon scale rather than double or triple Balticon, which was sad indeed.
The winner was a recreation of John Picacio's La Calavera, who was utterly stunning, and I'm quite proud of having been able to light her in a way that read as _dark_.
The half-time show was Raks Geek out of Chicago (a sneak preview of next year's con, perhaps?), whose acts included a video of a hoop-spinner, a belly-dancing wookie, and a fantastic gentleman dancer with obvious classical/contemporary training applied to his international fusion dance.
Food for the evening was a communally ordered pizza, I don't recall from where, and I've come to the conclusion that I like olives and ricotta on it. But I was definitely left with a Feed Me Meat Soon craving.
Friday was my night to meander the parties, which is to say to spend a few seconds to as much as a couple of minutes in each before being entirely overwhelmed. The evening ended curling up in the tech suite, which was overpopulated but at least I knew everyone in it.
The ALD had wanted to run the lightboard for the Hugos as well, and I ended up volunteering for one of the follow spot positions.
I'd largely endeavored to not hover over the ALD as she was getting ready, and after resetting the stage went to get lunch in the room - the left over pad thai from Eddie's was tasty, but did little to cut my meat craving.
As I headed back I ran into the Sound Designer who informed me that the room is being evacuated and the rehearsal is postponed. I stuck around to help direct traffic when I saw the ALD stride determinedly towards the ballroom and followed.
The room was half-filled with smoke. The cluster of besuitted hotel managers told us to double-check our gear, and one of our suppliers took a lift to touch and smell the ceiling-rigged equipment which we did not sniff two days prior. Unsurprisingly it did not turn out to be anything of ours. We were requested to shut down everything and clear out.
After a circuit through the dealer room we sat outside the ballroom area and pondered our contingencies. We had a plan B - the nominees would have fit into the second-largest room, it had a stage and a streaming setup, it would not have been glitzy but it would have served.
The room reopened, the culprit having been identified as a broken compressor belt in the HVAC system. The ceremony was reinstated with an hour's postponement. We'd lost three hours of work, but this was the sort of miracle we were good at pulling off.
It turned out that a number of nominees who had previously intended to attend in person had opted to go remote when the con sent around its notices of positive test results among con attendees. It took until quite close to the event to sort out who was attending via what medium. But this too is the sort of thing techs can cope with, along with other last-minute arrangements such as securing the Hugos statistics until they were ready to be released and stowing the remote winners' statues for the night.
Kudos to the con for its covid communications, btw - they were frequent and timely and as detailed as they could possibly be while maintaining confidentiality. It is a bit alarming that as many as 18 positive tests were reported so far, but the transparency, down to the specific program items the attendees were in and where they sat in the larger rooms, was useful. And my strategy of "occupy mostly the enormous empty ballroom" seems to have been as effective as I'd hoped it would be.
The occasion being formal, I donned a tailcoat and a pair of cute little demon wings before ascending the spot tower. I dubbed myself the Spotlight Gargoyle - a designation I have since then concluded I enjoy sufficiently to look for occasions to use it in the future.
As for a show like this light board and spots need to coordinate, I called that part of the show from the tower.
The official tech party was pleasant, but after a while I decided to divest of the tails and wings and to change to comfier shoes. I'd made it halfway back to the party before changing my mind and stumbling to bed.
For breakfast I attempted to revisit the crepes place I had enjoyed during the walkthrough, so back to Open City it was, this time for carryout of some eggs an a chocolate croissant.
I was to stage manage the closing ceremonies, which contained rather fewer surprises than the opening and came together easily enough. The entertainment was the Masquerade halftime group and another showcase by the highschoolers. And MRK was actually on hand to do her thing.
After the show I found myself entirely too exhausted to be much help with the teardown. I puttered about this and that minor task, but was mostly feeling useless. Around dinnertime we fled home and did not return the next morning.
And now we get to do it - well, much of it - all over again, as CostumeCon is in the area in April, and for my sins I'm its Assistant Technical Director. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/354563.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.
Home from "Discon ai-ai-ai!" aka CurseCon aka The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I had an amazing time of it. For me it involved working with awesome people on accomplishing awesome things, if sometimes under less than ideal conditions, but this is absolutely what I signed up for.
Kudos and thanks forever to my intrepid Assistant Lighting Designer, without whom I could have done none of it.
I worked through the Monday, and therefore missed the bulk of load-in and rigging of the lights in the main ballroom, which was done largely by our supplier. (Shout-out to Atmosphere Lighting of Silver Spring, who have been consistently awesome.)
Tuesday's commute was made much more pleasant by sharing it with Larry. The first order of business was to get collections of road cases from the main ballroom to their respective rooms.
You might have heard of the hotel's notorious inaccessibility - they weren't exactly about ease of wheeled mobility in 1930, and the hotel has been updated to the minimal-est possible standard of compliance since. Most of the function rooms are positioned in cute but utterly confounding half-levels from each other, and navigating them via public hallways strained the definition of access. Navigating through the hotel's non-public areas with freight elevators involved traversing intricate warrens of ups and downs and twists and turns. It was physically exhausting and surprisingly exhilarating. There was something viscerally communal about the exercise. I did find my limits on attempting to move the lighting supplier's crates up a ramp, perhaps not impressing him.
Much of the rest of the day had been spent on assembly of lighting gear and projector screens. This part was made more exciting by the fact that the fire marshals have utterly destroyed our pre-planned room maps (which I thought they had reviewed on paper, but what do I know), and made us revise stage positions and ramps and projector and screen placements. We work with fire marshals _a lot_. We know how to plan for it. Heck, some of the planners are certified in it. This went well above and beyond our experience with such matters in any other city, and beyond published guidelines we'd tried to adhere to. I've later read that this rendered some of the rooms inaccessible to their panelists. Apologies were sent, I hear, but of course too late to help or to move the panels. This _sucks_, and my sympathies go to them, and I can't think of a single darn thing we could have done to have prevented it.
Lunch involved takeout from A Corner Bakery, of which I could eat the caprese sandwiches, much improved by taking a pair of them and stealing mozzarella and tomato from one to augment the other. Dinner involved individual containers of chicken or vegetable soup as well as little sandwich rolls. On later days turkey no cheese started to exist, but on the build day the only option that did not involve meat and cheese was really terrible hummus with a sprig of arugula on a gluten-free roll. It was awful.
Before heading out Larry and I spent some time measuring the stage and marking out wing locations for pipe and drape that I needed in place to be able to do focus the lights the day after. (Almost all of my lights were movers, which is awesome for not needing to go up to the lights to point them towards the stage at the cost of spending some time teaching each light where the stage is.)
Spouse was able to take the day off work, so we rode in together. I volunteered to stage manage the opening ceremonies, so once setup was complete and I could point my ALD and Chris the Wonderful Lighting Vendor Dude towards teaching the lights to be on the stage, my job became bouncing between assorted ceremony participants in an attempt to ascertain that they had what they needed.
This was made rather more challenging by the participation of the con chair, who promptly disappeared to a division head meeting, as well as some high school students who were not slated to turn up into an hour after the allegedly scheduled rehearsal. But the MC, Ulysses E. Campbell, proved an utter delight to work and intermittently chat with. To be fair the con chair - aka the author Mary Robinette Kowal - was pretty also delightful when she finally turned up again.
The convention invited Duke Ellington School for the Arts to participate in the proceedings, so the ceremony included an honor guard display and a show choir. This last proved a bit perplexing, as their set list had not been pre-confirmed - the choir was not asked to do a selection from their existing repertoire, but evidently there was no follow-up to determine what that might be. Which started with a wintry seasonal tune, veered into a rather less secular carol, and concluded with an entirely non-Christmas-related piece about worshipping Jesus. The students were enthusiastic and artistic, and I would have enjoyed the performances in many other contexts, but there was communication pertaining to knowing one's audience that did not happen here and a number of fans reported feeling out of place. I understand ConCom became aware of it and were discussing it, but I'm not sure what conclusions, if any, they arrived at, and I've not seen any Twitter tweetery. Upon much consideration I concluded that I am best off treating it as an example of local DC culture.
The school also had a half-dozen theater students to volunteer for tech, which greatly helped with our staffing shortage. They helped run tech and streaming in the panel rooms, worked the cameras and the spotlights for some of the events, helped with house and backstage operations, and were enthusiastic and helpful. They seemed to enjoy our love of what we do, the rapidly tangible results, and the fact that we treated them much as we would any other new volunteers. I am hoping we have tempted their supervising adult into bringing a student contingent out for Costume Con.
With the ceremony out of the way I took the occasion to buy my ALD dinner at Umi Sushi. The pickup took 30 minutes instead of 20 and lacked one of the ordered rolls, but the food was tasty, which renders it a better option than the adjacent Tono Sushi, which our friends reviewed as friendly but unbearably bland.
The evening was concluded at Ex_Smof's Scotch party, for which he'd gotten an enormously large suite. Food was served in one room which required masking, booze was stationed in another, and the parlor and a balcony were designated for hanging out and partaking, which - combined with an exclusive list complete with a name checker at the door - made it an almost-comfortable affair. Said name-checker was a friend of
vvalkyri's, and was an interesting guy to talk to. He expressed interest in helping out, and was quite useful at strike on Sunday.
Thursday was, noteworthily, my first indoor restaurant meal since BeforeTimes. At 7am Open City was sparse enough that occupying a distant corner of it felt almost safe. It has teas that come in kinds, charmingly offers a pair of animal crackers with your tea or coffee, and their breakfasts are decadent - Spouse and I shared a pecan waffle thing and a ricotta-stuffed french toast thing, and both were great.
The big event on Thursday was a concert by Gamer Symphony Orchestra. The Marvelous ALD is a whole lot more into concert lighting than I am, and therefore got that job, which meant that I was largely superfluous for the day and evening except for doing general prep for all the everything else.
One noteworthy item that transpired was that as we were puttering about we smelled smoke in the house. We sniffed every piece of equipment within our reach, determined it was nothing of ours and summoned the hotel electrician. He sniffed around a bit too and suggested that this was because the ballroom has not been in use for four months, and this was dust burning off the lights or from the HVAC vents or something, much like one might smell when one turns on heat or AC in one's car the first time of the season. It seemed like a plausible enough explanation, and the smell dissipated shortly.
Spouse was having a stressful day, so I attempted to take him to the zoo, but it was closed. We settled for knocking about the hotel's spacious gardens area.
At the concert I had originally planned to do cable management for the hand-held camera operator, but as I returned to the ballroom I - for the first time of the week - found it overwhelming.
lonebear was kind enough to offer to step in, and I - having ascertained the house was ready to open and needful communications were happening - slinked off to find dinner. Alas I did not have an opportunity to touch base with
silmaril, who'd been quite busy pre show and whom I did not catch in between one or both of us being occupied.
None of the restaurants offered outdoor seating, but the weather was pleasant, and Eddie's Cafe, the Chinese place across the street, had a handful of utilitarian picnic tables at which one could enjoy their takeout. They were pretty quick and pretty tasty and definitely maximum bang for the buck for anyone who'd not rather be having the Chipotle next door.
I believe this was the evening during which
selki had her lovely little private gathering, which had a number of nifty people. It was fantastic to see her before another round at ex_smof's and adjourning to the tech suite before collapsing.
If there's one event at conventions that I think of as mine it's the Masequerade. There are few things I find as exhilarating as looking at a costume in front of me and throwing together a lighting look to make it its best as quickly as I can.
This requires a whole lot of pre-prep, and the day prior I'd spent a bit of time with Lighting Vendor Chris building the toolkit for me to be fast at building and saving and playing back a costume sequence. The work paid off, and I hope we're as good next time when we do it without a trained professional on hand.
Unfortunately the rehearsal day was not as strenuous as they sometimes are, because we only got to 11 entries. We have gone to quite some lengths to make it awesome. And it was. Just, well, on a half-a-Balticon scale rather than double or triple Balticon, which was sad indeed.
The winner was a recreation of John Picacio's La Calavera, who was utterly stunning, and I'm quite proud of having been able to light her in a way that read as _dark_.
The half-time show was Raks Geek out of Chicago (a sneak preview of next year's con, perhaps?), whose acts included a video of a hoop-spinner, a belly-dancing wookie, and a fantastic gentleman dancer with obvious classical/contemporary training applied to his international fusion dance.
Food for the evening was a communally ordered pizza, I don't recall from where, and I've come to the conclusion that I like olives and ricotta on it. But I was definitely left with a Feed Me Meat Soon craving.
Friday was my night to meander the parties, which is to say to spend a few seconds to as much as a couple of minutes in each before being entirely overwhelmed. The evening ended curling up in the tech suite, which was overpopulated but at least I knew everyone in it.
The ALD had wanted to run the lightboard for the Hugos as well, and I ended up volunteering for one of the follow spot positions.
I'd largely endeavored to not hover over the ALD as she was getting ready, and after resetting the stage went to get lunch in the room - the left over pad thai from Eddie's was tasty, but did little to cut my meat craving.
As I headed back I ran into the Sound Designer who informed me that the room is being evacuated and the rehearsal is postponed. I stuck around to help direct traffic when I saw the ALD stride determinedly towards the ballroom and followed.
The room was half-filled with smoke. The cluster of besuitted hotel managers told us to double-check our gear, and one of our suppliers took a lift to touch and smell the ceiling-rigged equipment which we did not sniff two days prior. Unsurprisingly it did not turn out to be anything of ours. We were requested to shut down everything and clear out.
After a circuit through the dealer room we sat outside the ballroom area and pondered our contingencies. We had a plan B - the nominees would have fit into the second-largest room, it had a stage and a streaming setup, it would not have been glitzy but it would have served.
The room reopened, the culprit having been identified as a broken compressor belt in the HVAC system. The ceremony was reinstated with an hour's postponement. We'd lost three hours of work, but this was the sort of miracle we were good at pulling off.
It turned out that a number of nominees who had previously intended to attend in person had opted to go remote when the con sent around its notices of positive test results among con attendees. It took until quite close to the event to sort out who was attending via what medium. But this too is the sort of thing techs can cope with, along with other last-minute arrangements such as securing the Hugos statistics until they were ready to be released and stowing the remote winners' statues for the night.
Kudos to the con for its covid communications, btw - they were frequent and timely and as detailed as they could possibly be while maintaining confidentiality. It is a bit alarming that as many as 18 positive tests were reported so far, but the transparency, down to the specific program items the attendees were in and where they sat in the larger rooms, was useful. And my strategy of "occupy mostly the enormous empty ballroom" seems to have been as effective as I'd hoped it would be.
The occasion being formal, I donned a tailcoat and a pair of cute little demon wings before ascending the spot tower. I dubbed myself the Spotlight Gargoyle - a designation I have since then concluded I enjoy sufficiently to look for occasions to use it in the future.
As for a show like this light board and spots need to coordinate, I called that part of the show from the tower.
The official tech party was pleasant, but after a while I decided to divest of the tails and wings and to change to comfier shoes. I'd made it halfway back to the party before changing my mind and stumbling to bed.
For breakfast I attempted to revisit the crepes place I had enjoyed during the walkthrough, so back to Open City it was, this time for carryout of some eggs an a chocolate croissant.
I was to stage manage the closing ceremonies, which contained rather fewer surprises than the opening and came together easily enough. The entertainment was the Masquerade halftime group and another showcase by the highschoolers. And MRK was actually on hand to do her thing.
After the show I found myself entirely too exhausted to be much help with the teardown. I puttered about this and that minor task, but was mostly feeling useless. Around dinnertime we fled home and did not return the next morning.
And now we get to do it - well, much of it - all over again, as CostumeCon is in the area in April, and for my sins I'm its Assistant Technical Director. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/354563.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.