I'm very very sorry I didn't get to meet most of you in person. My Thursday flight that was supposed to arrive at 3:30 ended up being cancelled and I had to fly into Raegan, metro to amtrak only to find out no more trains ran at 11:30, then through miraculous serendipity taxi all the way to BWI with a woman who was gracious enough to drive us downtown if we covered the cab, which we were told would be at least 100 bucks, but ended up being exactly 50, thank god. I was lucky I got any sleep Thursday night at all.
You'll all be happy to know I recorded the AMVS4 premiere as well, reactions included, for those of you who weren't able to make it to the event, and for timing analyzing and such. I gotta say, that room SUUUUUUCCCCCKKKED!! We MUST find a way to guarantee we never ever show fanparodies in a rectangular dual-speaker setup ever again. Professionally cut audio is the only type that even has a chance of being heard, like our clips were. We were very lucky in that regard, but even then a few faltered in the face of the reverb. Some of the jokes in the ones that cleared the room were great if you could hear them, but you just couldn't make it out so everyone started leaving. Sad really.
For me the sad part is, the censored POS was pretty funny, but with the reverb causing everything to be so muffled, the censor sounds started coming too close together as I was afraid of and killing the narrative. The uncensored in this situation would have probably worked better unfortunately. Hopefully next year on the replay we get a room that will not screw things up. Oddly enough, the off-handed idea I put in for the final text box about 'exploding 2 days after the warranty' caught everyone. I was completely surprised, I'd totally forgotten I even put that there ^^ If we can get away with it, I'd like it if we can upload the censored and uncensored versions to AMVS.org. Had a good hour long conversation Friday night with Scott too about the AMVS4 troubles and censorship and just chatting about what he's dealing with now and such. Enlightening stuff.
Speaking of which, I'll be uploading the recorded premiere for creators later on when I can get it off my camera. Now here's the thing. Whatever you do, you can never, ever, ever post the recording anywhere. You can of course show family and friends but please don't send it to anyone. I got permission to do it only with that promise, otherwise Otakon could be fined... a lot. Technically Scott joked with me that I shouldn't have told him, but ya know... I'm an idiot. But since it's really just for our studying of the reactions and creators' use, their lawyer said it was authorized. I just really need to stress that it's for all of our personal use and not for upload anywhere, otherwise we could get Otakon fined a good chunk of money.
Now... who else liked the Gundam one ^^ I was all 'please be good, please be good!' and then that first line " ...Hmm.... I seem to have bolted myself to this missile..." Priceless. Had its slow points, but I was impressed.
Edit:
When that guy asked us to stand up, I noticed that some of you were really in the back.
I was in the front, I didn't see anyone else. I don't even remember being told to stand or raise hands on Saturday. I was asked to stand up on Friday and was COMPLETELY alone, and then asked to say a few words up front... pretty embarrassing, mic broke, was screaming, nobody could hear me... came back on, said some shit I didn't remember and went and sat down ^^ Hopefully somewhere in there I told them to have fun and join in or something inspirational.