Variant Edition

We went. We saw. We survived.

This past weekend, the entire Variant Edition crew travelled down to Baltimore Maryland to attend the Baltimore Comic-con. We left New Jersey on Friday evening full of expectation. We arrived in Maryland later that night ready to take on anything.

We got up Saturday and prepared ourselves for what we knew would be a long day. And it was. We didn’t stop moving until we got back to the hotel sometime around 11:30 that night.

From 10-5 on Saturday we covered just about every inch of the show floor - multiple times. We had decided that the divide and conquer approach would work best, so we divided up into 2 crews, each with a camera and a walkie talkie and ran around trying to get as many interviews and stories as we could manage. At 5, we left the convention center and speed-walked to the Marriott, where the Harvey Awards were being held. We then spent the next few hours prepping for the event: setting up cameras and audio, getting changed into more evening appropriate attire and interviewing some of the attendees. While the guest were enjoying dinner, we attacked the cheese table. The Awards were great and I can’t wait to cut the footage together. After the awards ceremony, we made some interview plans for Sunday and packed up our gear before dragging ourselves back to the car.

It didn’t take any of us very long to fall asleep Saturday night…

Sunday started a little slower, as we were still recovering from Saturday. A late start and a wrong turn delayed our arrival at the con, but not too late to get to our interviews that we had set up the night before. Let’s just say that we were either conducting an interview or running to the next the entire day. (well, except for that half hour we decided to sit down and chill during Olivier Coipel’s panel) In fact, we were still shooting footage after the convention officially closed!

We all had a great time and I’m sure we’ll share our favorite moments in the next few episodes. We talked to a lot of creators and even some fans and were surprised by how well we were recieved. As for the con itself? Organizers Brad and Mark deserve every bit of praise that can be heaped upon them. They pulled out all the stops for us. And from how the creators were talking, that’s just par for the course. They put on a fantastic show and had a super crew that even handled the fire alarm on Saturday with grace.

We literally have hours and hours of footage from the con. We lost track of all the interviews that we conducted. Some that I can remember: Perez, Oeming, Turner, Larsen, Romitas, Coipel. There’s lots more.

Those of you paying attention the last 2 weeks will have noticed that we put up a review, column or episode just about every weekday. You’ll probably also notice that it’s time for Episode 27 to come out. We shot 27 before the con with the idea of getting it out before we left…well, the prep work we needed to do before leaving killed that plan. So instead of being early, it’s going to be late. I’m still working on finishing it. It features our first transatlantic interview. I’m hoping for a Wednesday release. (but it may be Thursday)

Episode 28 will be our special Baltimore Comic-con episode…every minute of which will be from the con! But we got so many interviews that we’ll be running them in following episodes until we run through them all. I’m not sure the release date for that yet…I’ll have that figured out in the next day or so.

So thank you for your patience on Ep 27. It will be worth the wait. And 28? Well, I’m grinning ear to ear just thinking about it…

-kevin

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:23 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.