As all of you know we've been trying to explore a lot of avenues to reach people and get our knowledge out there. And a number of those have come about in unexpected ways.
In this case it came about less than two weeks before the event.
How We Got Here
Earlier this year I was at an event called HavenCon, a local LGBTQ+ focused convention. I went to go hang out because I wanted to support the event plus an artist I knew was going to be vending there. Ikkicon had a table there. Last year we had tried to see if we could get some sort of representation at that convention but it didn't come through. So I talked with the people there at the table about what we wanted to do. And one of them was actually the Program Director. They were very interested in the highly audience interactive nature of what we would like to present and said we should certainly submit what we had as panels.
We submitted three panels/demos: both the Cosplay Shot and Light Painting demos we did at Okashicon, plus one about exploring cosplay photography outside of conventions.
Initially all three were turned down.
I did ask them for feedback on why that was. Since we're still trying to figure out how to best communicate what we want to do I thought that getting some insight would help with that.
It pretty much came down to the fact that they got a ton of submissions.
Okay, fair enough. With two of our panels we would require longer than normal set up/breakdown time so that had to be considered. We were going to be there in some capacity anyway.
Then on December 15th I got an email asking if we were still willing to put on our Light Painting demo. On their panel submission form they specifically have a question about if you're willing to be a backup in case a drop occurs. And we were. And the slot they had for us was great: 7:30PM on Friday. And they could give us our full 90 minute runtime.
How Things Went
When we submitted these demos we specifically stated that we would need a good chunk of time for set up and tear down. Based on what we ran into we think they had a number of panel drops for Friday evening... but because of that we didn't have our setup time. Plus there was a panel right before ours. Now thankfully since Opening Ceremonies was before that and they pretty much schedule nothing during that slot (plus 30 minutes on both ends) we were able to get access to the room to set up as much stuff as we could without getting in the way of the panel before us. The Ikkicon staff completely understood what we wanted to do and were very willing to help us out. Props to them.
The panel before ours actually ran over time. So for our setup we were pretty rushed to get things together. As we were doing that we did have a running conversation with our audience. We certainly didn't want to be quiet and have everyone lose interest. But with those conversations there was certainly a wide array of observations and experiences. I was honestly a bit surprised by what I had heard. Though with that I could tell a lot of minds were pretty open. So that's a good start.
We did run into some issues at the start. With the rushed open things were bound to be missed. But everyone there understood how they could happen and just went with it.
This panel was a great time. We got some really well thought out questions that I really did not expect to get. The fact that people saw what we were doing and were already considering the next steps to make things 'complete' said a lot. And people just wanted to have fun and see what we'd get. Who else could say they got to throw around a bunch of glowsticks or have some fairy lights yeet themselves off of a wooden dowel for a shot?
The most important part... people just 'got it' and wanted to play along. And learn things.
This was the first panel we were finally able to record. We've been wanting to document our panels but for reasons we couldn't. This time around I wanted to make sure that happened. I had a really old Canon camcorder setup to get video. And a Zoom H4n to record audio especially off of my wireless lav mic. Audio certainly ain't perfect. What I didn't expect was for the camcorder to drop frame rate when we turned the lights off. But it ended up capturing some small bits of the light painting before people would see the complete image. I had never used the auto exposure adjust feature before but here I think it lends something. You see some of the puzzle pieces before they're all put together.
The photos you see after this are after some editing. Are they perfect? No. Mainly we want to show what was possible. But what follows after that are things that people will have to think through to get the image they want.
We had a great time doing this panel. We had no idea what kind of turn out we'd get compared to what we had at Okashicon. It went much better than we hoped for. Not just in terms of people. But by the questions they brought up and just how willing they wanted to get in on things made this panel a success.
