Vancouver 2006 Creation Con 1 - Friday and Set Tour
This is my con report, which is mine, and it may possibly contain spoilers at some point, so I'm putting in a cut tag. Here's Friday and the set visit, and I hope to make it through the rest later.
Friday
Thursday, I had picked up z_rayne from feochadn's place, and we waved goodbye to movies_michelle as we took off. She spent the night, so we could get going early -- both of us woke up spontaneously going 'con. Yay!' at about 5:30 am, so getting going wasn't a problem -- and then we took off. Traffic was fine, but the weather was rotten (somewhere around Marysville we hit torrential rain and it followed us up across the border.)
After a small mishap with missing a turn and wandering around Burnaby a bit, we made it to the hotel around 10:30 am. Amazingly enough, we were able to check in and get ourselves organized, before calling casspeach so we could have lunch together. Then registration at 12:30 -- apparently most of the con had registered the night before, in a 2-hour wait line, so ours wasn't a bad wait at all -- and we ended up with the 7:00 am set tour on Saturday.
(This actually turned out to be a good thing, as in being the first group through, they hadn’t gotten their act together yet; we were supposed to start with our photos being taken in the Atlantis gate room, but instead, ended up wandering around for a long time while they set up, so we got lots and lots of gate room photos. I even have a picture of me behind Weir’s desk.)
This was the first of our writing breaks, I think, as we had time to kill before the opening session. (Two things to remember for the next Creation Con here: 1) bring your own internet cable as the wireless only goes up to the third floor, and 2) always have a portable entertainment device at hand, whether it be book, PDA, or game boy, as you will spend a long, long, long time in lines. Even the internet connections are slow.)
(We ended up doing occasional writing jogs, and I think I got the B2B story straightened out, as every single plot I had before this weekend eventually devolved to “oh, that’s just like this other story, isn’t it?”)
So, Smarmy Used Car Sales Guy (‘Adam’) opened the show, with all of the “whoop-whoop-hollar-yay us” stuff that drives me crazy, and followed it up with a ‘great; music video to get the crowd excited.
“We didn’t start the Fire”, and dude, it totally killed me with the literalism. Yup, every time the song says ‘Fire’ there is literally fire on-screen. This was pretty much the level of vidding throughout the con, and the audience lapped it up like cream.
I didn’t attend the headliner panel on Friday, the one with Zahara and Payne. We did attend the special effect and Atlantis stunt panels, both of which I really enjoyed but can remember little about, other than that some of the stunt guys end up as walk-on roles as Marines. They also look really cool when they do double back-flips and mid-air twists from a standing position, and Teyla and Weir's stunt doubles are great.
We had a long dinner that night - Zoe, Casspeach, myself and S, the woman sitting next to me at the con - with wine, good food, and desert. Then Zoe, Cass and I crashed as we had to get up at 5:30 to get out to the bus at 6:30 on Saturday, while S went on to the cabaret.
This would be our first real encounter with the annoyance of the hotel elevators, as you had to use your card key to get to the floor you wanted, and it was very picky how it went in. (Also, you couldn't go to a different floor other than the one your room was on, so all weekend we kept having to go down to the lobby first to visit a different hotel room.)
Saturday Set Tour
God, this was the big day. We ordered in breakfast, so we could get down to the busses on time. We ended up in the second bus, which turned out to be cool, as that was the one Martin Gero as tour guide. (The other guide was John Smith, the executive producer. Note that while John was able to go home after his set of tours -- he spoke on Sunday -- Martin went from tour group to presentation to autograph session to collapse at about ten or so that night.) We got to hear a little of the history, how the studio was called ‘Bridges’ as it was originally used to make bridge segments for like the Golden Gate bridge. This meant that there were really huge, open buildings just waiting to be used as stages.) Our group started with Atlantis, and after the gate room, we headed past the parking spaces and casting and accounting trailers to ‘the blade’ stage. (The story here is that Blade 3 finished filming in the building next to the main SG-1 set, and they had built this huge structure that would cost them 4-450K to haul away. So the Stargate franchise bought it for $1, and modified it to be the expedition’s living quarters in Atlantis. And yes, the tiny little catwalk that Ronon and John run on is a real tiny little catwalk at the top of the set.)
We got to see the transporter set here (which is super small), a rail gun, a wraith cocoon, and the bridge of the Orion. Then we passed the main section of the set (which was cordoned off) and went onto their new 1.5 million dollar village set. (Before this, they did all of their village shots on location, and it was just getting hard to find new places for villages to be. *g* The last on-location one they did was Camelot for SG-1 last year, which was shot on the Underworld 2 site, in 4 days of continuous rain. All of that mud they are struggling through? Is the real thing.)
The village set was dolled up for Irresistible, which is a light-hearted ep with a fun guest star. So it was colorful, set up as a market place, with a tavern and shops, with open air flower carts and bright fabric pennants hanging around the space. They cycled the lighting for us so we could see what it looked like as day, twilight, and night time; it really was a fabulous site.
Then it was back out again (as we were now running into John Smith’s tour) and we still had quite a ways to go. So we headed for the caves (Ford's cave, the cave in Epiphany, other random caves in SG1 and SGA) (because...caves are hard and rocky and things fall in them and break, plus they are really hard to light) From there we head to the Daedelus, through its corridors (it’s a figure 8, so it looks like they are doing twists and turns and going around other corridors, only they aren’t), passed Hermiod’s station, and onto to the bridge.
::cough:: I sat in the commander's chair. ::cough::
And then we got to play on tour the puddle jumper, and see the F-302. This was the point where they really started to prod us along. I did get to sit in the back of the jumper, and took Zoe's picture through the front viewscreen. (She was standing behind the co-pilot's chair, and I was on the outside.)
We left the jumper and went past the ‘baby stage’ (called that as the ceiling is so low) and across the alley to...Stage 3? (it may be Stage 4. I was amused by the ‘Who’s who at the zoo and where do you park’ sign and really didn’t pay attention to which one it was.) At that point, we were in the SGC, and had looped into John Smith's new tour group, so we never actually got into the SG-1 gate room.
Instead, we had to dash back to the SGA set for our tour photo and pile onto the buses to head back to the hotel. Needless to say, I am grinning like a total idiot in my shot, with the thought balloon I am so jazzed to be here clearly written above my head.
And at that point, we wandered over to the grocery store, and then I napped.
ETA: More other people's photos. Apparently I missed 'The Chief' from BSG by not going to Zahara and Payne's pannel, ah well.
Friday
Thursday, I had picked up z_rayne from feochadn's place, and we waved goodbye to movies_michelle as we took off. She spent the night, so we could get going early -- both of us woke up spontaneously going 'con. Yay!' at about 5:30 am, so getting going wasn't a problem -- and then we took off. Traffic was fine, but the weather was rotten (somewhere around Marysville we hit torrential rain and it followed us up across the border.)
After a small mishap with missing a turn and wandering around Burnaby a bit, we made it to the hotel around 10:30 am. Amazingly enough, we were able to check in and get ourselves organized, before calling casspeach so we could have lunch together. Then registration at 12:30 -- apparently most of the con had registered the night before, in a 2-hour wait line, so ours wasn't a bad wait at all -- and we ended up with the 7:00 am set tour on Saturday.
(This actually turned out to be a good thing, as in being the first group through, they hadn’t gotten their act together yet; we were supposed to start with our photos being taken in the Atlantis gate room, but instead, ended up wandering around for a long time while they set up, so we got lots and lots of gate room photos. I even have a picture of me behind Weir’s desk.)
This was the first of our writing breaks, I think, as we had time to kill before the opening session. (Two things to remember for the next Creation Con here: 1) bring your own internet cable as the wireless only goes up to the third floor, and 2) always have a portable entertainment device at hand, whether it be book, PDA, or game boy, as you will spend a long, long, long time in lines. Even the internet connections are slow.)
(We ended up doing occasional writing jogs, and I think I got the B2B story straightened out, as every single plot I had before this weekend eventually devolved to “oh, that’s just like this other story, isn’t it?”)
So, Smarmy Used Car Sales Guy (‘Adam’) opened the show, with all of the “whoop-whoop-hollar-yay us” stuff that drives me crazy, and followed it up with a ‘great; music video to get the crowd excited.
“We didn’t start the Fire”, and dude, it totally killed me with the literalism. Yup, every time the song says ‘Fire’ there is literally fire on-screen. This was pretty much the level of vidding throughout the con, and the audience lapped it up like cream.
I didn’t attend the headliner panel on Friday, the one with Zahara and Payne. We did attend the special effect and Atlantis stunt panels, both of which I really enjoyed but can remember little about, other than that some of the stunt guys end up as walk-on roles as Marines. They also look really cool when they do double back-flips and mid-air twists from a standing position, and Teyla and Weir's stunt doubles are great.
We had a long dinner that night - Zoe, Casspeach, myself and S, the woman sitting next to me at the con - with wine, good food, and desert. Then Zoe, Cass and I crashed as we had to get up at 5:30 to get out to the bus at 6:30 on Saturday, while S went on to the cabaret.
This would be our first real encounter with the annoyance of the hotel elevators, as you had to use your card key to get to the floor you wanted, and it was very picky how it went in. (Also, you couldn't go to a different floor other than the one your room was on, so all weekend we kept having to go down to the lobby first to visit a different hotel room.)
Saturday Set Tour
God, this was the big day. We ordered in breakfast, so we could get down to the busses on time. We ended up in the second bus, which turned out to be cool, as that was the one Martin Gero as tour guide. (The other guide was John Smith, the executive producer. Note that while John was able to go home after his set of tours -- he spoke on Sunday -- Martin went from tour group to presentation to autograph session to collapse at about ten or so that night.) We got to hear a little of the history, how the studio was called ‘Bridges’ as it was originally used to make bridge segments for like the Golden Gate bridge. This meant that there were really huge, open buildings just waiting to be used as stages.) Our group started with Atlantis, and after the gate room, we headed past the parking spaces and casting and accounting trailers to ‘the blade’ stage. (The story here is that Blade 3 finished filming in the building next to the main SG-1 set, and they had built this huge structure that would cost them 4-450K to haul away. So the Stargate franchise bought it for $1, and modified it to be the expedition’s living quarters in Atlantis. And yes, the tiny little catwalk that Ronon and John run on is a real tiny little catwalk at the top of the set.)
We got to see the transporter set here (which is super small), a rail gun, a wraith cocoon, and the bridge of the Orion. Then we passed the main section of the set (which was cordoned off) and went onto their new 1.5 million dollar village set. (Before this, they did all of their village shots on location, and it was just getting hard to find new places for villages to be. *g* The last on-location one they did was Camelot for SG-1 last year, which was shot on the Underworld 2 site, in 4 days of continuous rain. All of that mud they are struggling through? Is the real thing.)
The village set was dolled up for Irresistible, which is a light-hearted ep with a fun guest star. So it was colorful, set up as a market place, with a tavern and shops, with open air flower carts and bright fabric pennants hanging around the space. They cycled the lighting for us so we could see what it looked like as day, twilight, and night time; it really was a fabulous site.
Then it was back out again (as we were now running into John Smith’s tour) and we still had quite a ways to go. So we headed for the caves (Ford's cave, the cave in Epiphany, other random caves in SG1 and SGA) (because...caves are hard and rocky and things fall in them and break, plus they are really hard to light) From there we head to the Daedelus, through its corridors (it’s a figure 8, so it looks like they are doing twists and turns and going around other corridors, only they aren’t), passed Hermiod’s station, and onto to the bridge.
::cough:: I sat in the commander's chair. ::cough::
And then we got to play on tour the puddle jumper, and see the F-302. This was the point where they really started to prod us along. I did get to sit in the back of the jumper, and took Zoe's picture through the front viewscreen. (She was standing behind the co-pilot's chair, and I was on the outside.)
We left the jumper and went past the ‘baby stage’ (called that as the ceiling is so low) and across the alley to...Stage 3? (it may be Stage 4. I was amused by the ‘Who’s who at the zoo and where do you park’ sign and really didn’t pay attention to which one it was.) At that point, we were in the SGC, and had looped into John Smith's new tour group, so we never actually got into the SG-1 gate room.
Instead, we had to dash back to the SGA set for our tour photo and pile onto the buses to head back to the hotel. Needless to say, I am grinning like a total idiot in my shot, with the thought balloon I am so jazzed to be here clearly written above my head.
And at that point, we wandered over to the grocery store, and then I napped.
ETA: More other people's photos. Apparently I missed 'The Chief' from BSG by not going to Zahara and Payne's pannel, ah well.