Putting the con back in WonderCon
Feb. 13th, 2006 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdI wasn't planning to go to Wondercon again Sunday, but it only took half an hour to get the patio ready for the painters, and once I fired up the two PCs to transfer files it was best to just walk away for a few hours. So I got the train to SF, and arrived at 2 pm, worrying that I had missed half of Trailer Park, which is usually my favorite part of any con.
Got there, went up to the big room, and saw that they had slipped the programs, and trailer park was starting in a few minutes. Good. Or so I thought.
Turns out that the techies either did not know to clean off a DVD if it didn't play, or they had a bum player and no spare (hard to believe in a major convention center) because most of the titles never got onto the screen. There were only a couple of trailers I had not seen before, and nothing particularly new and exciting.
Poked my head into a couple of the panels, but they were all either boring or way to deep into a particular fandom than I could follow. Also looked into the Browncoats auction room, hoping to spot a familiar face, but it was almost empty.
So I went downstairs and had lunch, people-watched (the table had a view of outside and the big convention center lobby), then went to the film maker's 101 panel, which I thought would be fun.
It wasn't.
Imagine a panel of rank amateurs with no clues at all, giving advice on how to make a movie. Typical advice:
"Keep writing scripts until they don't suck as much as the last one"
"Costumes are all around you - find a fan with a costume who also wants to be an actor and put him in your movie"
"Download simple editing software from the Internet, and when you've used it a little, get some [pirated] good software. It's intimidating, but not as much as before you tried the simple software."
Please note the panelist did not actually say "pirated", but his intonation and gestures told us this was what he meant.
Five minutes of this was all I could take, so I left. That was the last panel of the con, anyway.
Got there, went up to the big room, and saw that they had slipped the programs, and trailer park was starting in a few minutes. Good. Or so I thought.
Turns out that the techies either did not know to clean off a DVD if it didn't play, or they had a bum player and no spare (hard to believe in a major convention center) because most of the titles never got onto the screen. There were only a couple of trailers I had not seen before, and nothing particularly new and exciting.
Poked my head into a couple of the panels, but they were all either boring or way to deep into a particular fandom than I could follow. Also looked into the Browncoats auction room, hoping to spot a familiar face, but it was almost empty.
So I went downstairs and had lunch, people-watched (the table had a view of outside and the big convention center lobby), then went to the film maker's 101 panel, which I thought would be fun.
It wasn't.
Imagine a panel of rank amateurs with no clues at all, giving advice on how to make a movie. Typical advice:
"Keep writing scripts until they don't suck as much as the last one"
"Costumes are all around you - find a fan with a costume who also wants to be an actor and put him in your movie"
"Download simple editing software from the Internet, and when you've used it a little, get some [pirated] good software. It's intimidating, but not as much as before you tried the simple software."
Please note the panelist did not actually say "pirated", but his intonation and gestures told us this was what he meant.
Five minutes of this was all I could take, so I left. That was the last panel of the con, anyway.
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