My Motley Meanderings

At Orbital 2008 last weekend I directed another episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. For the uninitiated this involves randomly choosing an episode of Torchwood from a selection of pre-prepared scripts, casting the characters pretty much at random, staging each of the key scenes in places around a convention hotel using any props that happen to come to hand, taking photos of them, and posting them on the web as a captioned slide show. I stole the idea from Blake's 7 Wobblevision to do at Year of the Teledu and it was so much fun that I volunteered to do it again.

So, without further ado, I present Day One.

We ran into a few teething troubles related to casting but I have some ideas for ways to make the scripts easier to work with in the future. The crowded social space we were working in and the fact that we overlapped with one of the most popular items of the whole weekend caused some slight problems but I think the end result turned out pretty well, I had lots of fun doing it, and I'd like to thank the cast (especially Carys) for being such great sports.

In case you missed the one we did at YotT, it was Cyberwoman.

I have already volunteered to do another episode at Redemption 2009 and could easily be persuaded to do it at other cons I'm going to if you give me a bit of notice to sort out the scripts in advance.

Monday from about 9AM to 3:30PM was spent rushing around finishing things off in the workshop and getting prepared for the Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition. SMS and Eira presented two guided tours while Cuil sabotaged the monorail, then suddenly it was 5PM and I had to rush off to the closing ceremony. watervole and the_magician thanked loads of people by name, then asked everyone who had helped in some way to run the con (including gophers and panellists) to stand up - that turned out to be roughly two thirds of us. Back down to Newbury where we spent the next couple of hours first shifting all the exhibits back to the workshop room, then sorting, packing, and clearing everything out of the room (the hotel wanted it back the next day).

When I came back to the dead dog party after dinner I staggered around for a few minutes in a bit of a daze thinking, "is it over already? what happened? I've only been to one panel item!" before twinfair nabbed me and sent me on a quest to remove the posters from the walls all over the hotel. After finishing that, Vince handed me a small fortune in spare groats! With only a few hours left to spend them, I bought a drink for myself and one for Bazooka, attempted to buy one for Mad Elf (the bar had run out of cider), then came to the conclusion that I was never going to get rid of them at that rate and it really wasn't worth stressing out about it, so I went and handed most of them to a poor student who no doubt was able to find a productive use for them.

I'm back home now and have unloaded Fenchurch. There was one incident of Lorry Rage[1] on the way home. I would like to know who the person in the Volvo estate was who waved at me as they passed, then did it again a couple of hundred miles later. I'm not sure if they were somebody from Eastercon or just a random Morris Minor enthusiast. ETA: That was feorag.

How to summarise Orbital? Having worked on it for over two years (since before I went to my first Eastercon!) I have so many different feelings that I don't think I can adequately articulate them. It seemed to go pretty well from the comments I've heard. We had possibly the biggest Eastercon programme ever, and the highest membership count for over twenty years. The highlights for me personally were the ceilidh, the Beer Hunt sketch in the cabaret, Mitch Benn's act, and directing the second episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. I really hope we can have ceilidhs again at future Eastercons - it's such a fun social thing to do, much more so than a disco in my opinion. I'm already planning to do more episodes of Torchwood Wobblevision and have some ideas for ways to make it run a bit smoother.

The post-con blues haven't hit yet (that will probably come tomorrow when I have to go back to work) but the post-con lurgy has already begun to attack my throat. I'll try to get Torchwood Wobblevision posted up within the next day or two. I have registered my interest in helping out with Odyssey 2010 - watch this space. Finally, I'd just like to say get well soon to multiclassgeek and tracey_jane!

[1] When I'm doing a long journey I tend to cruise along behind a lorry, keeping pace with it for long periods of time. It's less stressful and more economical than constantly overtaking. Often another lorry will creep up behind me at less than 1 MPH faster than the lorry in front, and the driver will decide to overtake. For some reason they expect me to slow down so as to open a gap for them instead of continuing to keep pace with the lorry in front. Sometimes they get quite pissed off when I don't, especially if the gap in front of me increases and I speed up to close it again. One of them today gave me a long blast on the horn and flashed his headlights several times when he realised his speed-limiter wouldn't allow him to go fast enough to overtake a Morris Minor.

The bid session took place first thing on Sunday morning so I headed there instead of the BC workshop. There was one bid - Odyssey 2010 - which consisted of gaspodia, watervole, Fiona Scarlett, and gaspodex. They explained they wanted to come back to the Radisson again in 2010, and that the hotel had offered them Orbital's contract as a starting point, including the same room and drinks rates. Starting membership rates would be £35. A vote was taken and it passed with an overwhelming majority. The main guests of honour so far are Alistair Reynolds, Liz Williams and Mike Carey, with frandowdsofa and johannes_d as the fan guests. Let's do it again in 2010!

I spent most of the day in the workshop again, escaping for a short while to look around the art show, then head down to the dealers' room to join Odyssey, Satellite 2, and Albacon 2010, which I don't know much amount about except cuddles_batcave appears to be involved. I also tried to buy a T shirt with SMS's Orbital artwork on it but they'd already sold out of my size so I had to place an order for them to post me one later.

In the evening I went to the play, then I stayed on for the Mitch Benn set, which was absolutely hilarious. He was still going strong when I had to duck out to go and run Torchwood Wobblevision. I was a bit nervous but not as badly as the first time I did it, at Year of the Teledu. We got enough main cast members despite most of the con still being at Mitch Benn, though a couple of the extras got used several times. I made one mistake in that I cast somebody as Rhys, then cut the one scene Rhys was in. Oops! That character should have been down as an extra in the script. Next time I do this I'm going to have to reformat the scripts to make them easier to use (eg. grouping the scenes by setting would reduce the amount of running back and forth). Everyone involved certainly seemed to have a lot of fun. I've had a quick look at the photos and they seem to have come out pretty well (for a Wobblevision). I'll get them edited and uploaded as soon as I have a chance.

Afterwards I hung around for a while then went to my first panel item of the con: "What is Sci-Fi?" I must admit I wasn't particularly interested in the topic of the panel, but it was interesting to see they had adopted the Redemption tradition of heavy panel/audience interaction (rather than the usual "questions at the end").

I spent most of Saturday looking after the BC workshop again, finally escaping for some food at about 6PM. After dinner I went to the combined masquerade and cabaret. Eira and SMS's "We're Going on a Beer Hunt" sketch made me laugh so hard I ran out of breath! The opera singer (at her first con I believe) was incredible. Unfortunately the cabaret overran and I didn't want to duck out before the end so I missed Blake's 7 Wobblevision. Afterwards I chilled out in the fan lounge for a while until it got pretty late and I was having trouble staying awake.

I've just opened the bedroom curtains on Sunday morning and it's snowing outside! OK, it's really feeble southern snow - the odd flake that melts as soon as it touches the ground - but I can't complain too much. At least it's not a heatwave.

After getting to bed well after 1AM on Friday morning I got up again before 7AM and headed off to breakfast. It seems that if you get there early (it's open before the official 8AM start time) you get seated in the brasserie instead of the overflow area, and they have actual fried eggs! After breakfast I tried to get a key for the cyberdrome workshop room from Ops but nobody was up yet, so I wandered around the hotel a bit and got chatting to asphodeline who had volunteered to be Neil Gaiman's assistant for the weekend was waiting in the foyer for him to arrive.

watervole got me a key so I went and unpacked the workshop and spent ages taping two layers of newspaper onto the wooden table, then assembling the basic structure of the City of the Future. The fact that it was a wooden table should have rung alarm bells - the reason we'd agreed to take that room was because on the site visit it had an unmovable glass table in it and the other one didn't, and Chaos Costume wanted to be able to move the table out of the way and work on the floor. The costumers arrived later on and immediately noticed that their room had a giant glass table in it: yes, the hotel had moved it since the site visit (I'm pretty sure they assured us they weren't going to put any more glass tables in before the con - they obviously thought it wasn't worth mentioning they were going to move an existing one). Anyway, we got everything swapped over and it doesn't seem to have caused too much confusion (though the newsletter somehow got an incorrect notice in it saying we'd moved into the other room on that corridor).

At 2PM I escaped from the workshop and went to the ceilidh training session. They started out slowly walking us through various steps and worked up to some faster dances. It was two hours long and energetic at times so I was pretty tired by the end - not good considering the real Ceilidh was later that evening. Most of the steps didn't sink in but the practise was useful and I picked up some useful tips. The people running the session were trying to teach us the steps to an English dance they didn't know from some instructions on a sheet of paper, and at one point they turned two pages over at once and got everyone on the floor into a complete muddle. As a nice bonus there were about twice as many women as men there so no trouble finding a partner!

In the evening after some dinner and the opening ceremony was the ceilidh itself. It was brilliant fun. I really should try to find a local dance I can go to. I danced for hours with many different partners and was completely knackered by the end. A special mention must go to helenex and munchkinstein who were spinning at double the speed of everyone else! After the ceilidh I wandered around for a bit wondering where everyone had gone (I hadn't realised it was after 1AM) and arborophile called me into the games room to play Werewolves. I didn't know the rules so I was trying to figure them out as the game progressed, while (successfully) hiding the fact that I'd been given one of the Werewolf cards!

As I write this on Saturday morning, it is hard to believe that the con only officially opened about twelve hours ago. It seems to be going pretty well so far as I can see.

After spending all day Wednesday sorting out the stuff for the Beyond Cyberdrome workshop and packing it into Fenchurch, I got up at 4AM on Thursday and headed off down to London. There were no major problems on the motorways (just a bit of congestion around Birmingham) and I arrived at about 10AM and spent a while helping to stuff registration packs before I had to leave and catch the tube into London to meet hermi_nomi at the Theatre Royal and see the Lord of the Rings musical. I was a bit nervous about getting lost on the underground or in the streets of London but actually it was fine and I had time to stop for a hot dog in Leicester Square.

The musical was worth seeing once. The live special effects (especially the giant robotic stage) were really spectacular. Unfortunately the songs were nothing special, and the plot really suffered from being condensed to less than three hours. I complained about all the stuff they had to leave out of the movies but the musical was much worse. Huge chunks were just skipped over. The part where Frodo was stabbed by a black rider occurred in the Prancing Pony. Later on Galadriel was singing about Lothlorien, then suddenly we were in the scene were Boromir tries to take the ring from Frodo. Among the more significant missing characters were Faramir and Eowyn. They never travelled the Paths of the Dead, never visited Minas Tirith, and we didn't get to see most of the important battles. I'm probably being too picky. As others have said, it may be more enjoyable for those who have never read the books or seen the movies (which also left things out but nowhere near as much as the musical). And there is the trouble - the people who enjoy this type of story have probably already experienced it in a better version. The songs and the acting could have made up for it, but unfortunately they didn't.

After the musical I walked back to Leicester Square and had a very nice pizza in an Italian restaurant, then got back on the tube and headed up to Camden for the Jonathan Coulton gig at Dingwalls. Shortly after leaving the tube station I was stopped by johncoxon, flickgc, and others who were waiting for somebody else. We walked up to the venue as a group and arrived nice and early, to find that there was already a huge queue in the yard outside. While we waited, aardvark179, ffutures, and several others arrived and joined our group - there were probably about 20 of us there who were also members of Orbital. The gig itself (once it finally got started) was absolutely brilliant. Jonathan Coulton is a really funny guy, not just in the songs he writes but in the banter between the songs, and the ad-libbed changes making fun out of the Americanisms in his lyrics. At one point he announced he was going to do a Christmas song, so we were all expecting Christmas is Interesting or Chiron Beta Prime, but instead he launched into an impromptu rendition of Feed the World, ad-libbing new lyrics as he went along. Hilarious. It was a very geeky crowd and everyone got really into it, singing along and cheering. Afterwards aardvark179 and I headed back on the tube and arrived at the hotel sometime after 1AM.

That's enough for now; I'll catch up with Friday's report while I'm supervising the BC workshop.

OK, I know I've been lax in updating my journal for the past few weeks. Work got pretty hectic for a while but I can't go into details in a public post. I guess it's time for another random update: ( Read more... )