Well, I'm back from the MEIC conference and, while it's fresh in my mind, I thought I would post a review. I came back a day early so I could enjoy my Sunday before I went back to work and to spend some time with all of my kids. I took my son Alex to the conference to offer him a unique life experience. MEIC stands for the Midwest Entertainment Industry Conference. It is in it's fourth year, and this year incorporated film, comic books, and video games in addition to the original music festival it stood for.
The conference is the brainchild of Stephen Zimmer, a remarkably mellow and laid back fellow. The conference was a huge success and an abject failure at the same time. Give Stephen credit for assembling such an incredible collection of talent for a conference in Lexington, Kentucky. There must have been fifty bands, film makers, and industry leaders from the field of comics and video games. I definitely felt the conference had value personally, if for no other reason to get a chance to interact with my peers in the game industry. On the other hand, it would have been nice if, after all of the hard work Stephen did to line up this array of talent, he managed to get an audience too. Touring bands which normaly play to a packed house usually had more people on stage than they did in the audience. In the game panels, we would have more industry veterans on the panel than the handful of University of Kentucky students who wandered in out of curiousity. I think the ingredients for a successful conference in the future are here, so long as too many people aren't pissed off at the lack of audience this year. I felt really bad for the bands, who must have thought this was a chance for them to get discovered by a major record label. They had made up flyers, promotional CD's, and went through a lot of trouble getting their equipment set up to play for no one. Often times the venues were cramped. I saw one band which had to pack all of their sound equipment in the corner of a run down smokey bar, in a space literally 8 feet by 8 feet. Once they powered up, they nearly broke the windows in the bar.
The conference was horribly disoraganized. Venues were spread all over and extremely difficult to find. The conference guide was a rambling affair that made it difficult to find out when, where, or why anything was happening. And, there was a lot happening. Presentations, films, and bands playing in 10 different locations simultaneously every night. The film showcase was attended almost completely by the actors in the movie and maybe one or two audience members. A nice venue though, if you could find it.
Alex and I drove down Thursday morning in the new car. A nice straight shot from St. Louis to Kentucky on I64. It was a safe and uneventful trip. When we arrived we checked into the hotel and noticed one thing right away. Apparently, it is a state law in Kentucky that every single person must smoke, in every location and at every time. It was a bit overwhelming. We got our conference badges and tried to figure out what we were going to do. We did get a chance to chat with conference mastermind Stephen Zimmer and thank him for his hard work.
Alex and I decided to go check out some bands in the evening. We had a hard time finding where a band was playing. We tried to get to the "Phoeonix Ballroom", asssuming it was some place in the hotel when it turned out to be the name of a nightclub a couple of blocks away. After walking in circles for a while we finally found it, and went inside. The band was just setting up, so we had dinner. Here is Alex enjoying his plate of ribs.
After dinner we went upstairs to watch the band. We listened to about 4 songs. There were two bartenders who acted very irritated to be there. They complained they had no advance warning of the event and there had been no promotion. Considering there were a grand total of six people there, counting me and Alex, who were not with the band I could see their point. Here is an actual photograph of the actual band we listened to. And, no, we did not buy one of their CD's.
Since there were many bands playing at about 10 different venues I figured we should go check out another one. According to the schedule, bands should have been playing for over an hour. We walked many blocks trying to locate another venue. Eventually we found a street that should have had a band. We walked up and down it twice, but couldn't hear any music. Finally, we saw the place, "Mia's" and went inside. The band was still setting up, and we sat in an extremely smokey and cramped bar. Alex and I pulled up a chair and I ordered a beer. Alex busied himself playing games on my Pocket PC. Once the band started playing they had a bunch of audio problems. They had been stuffed into a corner, literally, the size of a closet. Their huge amps and speakers stacked to the ceiling, clearly designed to fill a much larger space. There was a power hum so loud it did not bode well for the actual music. As one would expect, it was loud and distorted, and we only stayed for one or two songs.
When we returned to the hotel Thursday evening we just crashed for the night, hopeful that the next day would be more fruitful.
On Friday morning the first gaming session began at 11am. After breakfast Alex and I went to go find the conference room. What we found was absolute confusion. In the schedule rooms were marked as A, B, C, etc. However, there were no rooms A, B, C in the Hotel. I went up to one of the guys who was in charge of the conference and he had no ideal where anything was at. Eventually, by the second day, there were signs put up to indicate which rooms were which, but even then they were spread out all over, with some found down two escalators and through a shopping mall and down a long hallway.
When we found the game track room it was simply a small meeting room with a table and seating for about 15 people. It began to look like there were going to be more presenters than audience members. Here is a photograph I took of the room. Including myself and Alex there were four presenters and three attendees. Once the thing got started, a few more people showed up and we held an open discussion on the topic "How to find a publisher." We shared these words of wisdom with a couple of University of Kentucky college students and one guy taking night school at the community college. I'm sure we set loose a force the game industry will soon have to reckon with.
The panelists were supposed to be Jacob Hawley and Michael Ely of TKO-Software and David Whatley of Simutronics. None of them showed up, so instead myself, Steve Reid of Red Storm, Tom Smith and Eric Nofsinger of High Voltage software acted as the panelists. While I don't really know how useful it was to the limited audience, I certainly enjoyed the exchange myself. Several times during the discussion Alex even piped in with a comment from the young gamers perspective.
After the panel Alex and I returned to the room, where I made him do homework for several hours while I read "Children of Dune" by Frank Herbert. I got so sick of reading the Brian Herbert novels that I had to re-read the Dune Trilogy just to re-experience how good it could be. I'm really looking forward to polishing it off with "The God Emperor Of Dune" which I have not read in a very long time.
Alex in the hotel room doing his 'homework', yeah....
At 4:30pm we went back down to attend the session "Elements of Developing A Game Project : Overview of components in developing a gaming project, from conception, to design, to release". Speakers were supposed to be myself, Marc Mencher, Tom Smith, Steve Reid, David Howe and Jacob Hawley. Marc Mencher, David Howe and Jacob Hawley did not show up. Me, I went back to the room where we had the meeting in the morning. I got there early but there were already some people there chatting, so I sat on in. I had a nice exchange about artwork for about 15 minutes before I realized, this was clearly the wrong place! I checked the schedule and realized that my talk was supposed to be in Room C. I excused myself and took off trying to find 'Room C'; which turned out to be down two escalators, through a shopping mall, and down a long hallway. When I arrived Steve and Tom were already conducting the session and there were a reasonable number of audience members. Just with the nature of the discussion it ended up touching on the work environment, including the subject of crunches. I ended up expressing myself a bit too intensly on this topic and I should have left the subject well enough alone. Nevertheless, we imparted wisdom and generally scared a lot of college kids away from the idea of working in the game industry.
Alex and I went by the small expo being held and had a very pleasant conversation with comic book artist Mark Wheatley who is known for Frankenstein Mobster. We bought a signed copy and had a pleasant chat. His talk was the one I mistakenly interupted earlier in the day. He is a very talented individual and was a great guy to chat with.
Mark Wheatley
Since one of the tracks at the conference was for film-makers, I thought it would be cool to go see some movies. There was one film advertised as a post apocalyptic landscape where the end of the world had been caused by a bad fad diet drug. That sounded awful interesting. After dinner Alex and I finally found the movie theatre at the Student Center on the sprawling University of Kentucky campus. We had a lot of fun hanging out in the lobby talking to the directors and stars of the films we were about to watch. I have no idea what I was thinking though. I figured they would be, what, you know movies. I figured they might have a little bit of inappropriate content, but Alex is good at covering his eyes at the bad parts and I'm not one of those parents who thinks he will be scarred for life if he hear's the word 'fuck'.
Director and one of the stars of Zombie Planet.
More of the stars of Zombie Planet. I don't know who all is who, but the cast includes Christopher Rose, Frank Farhat, Karl Gustav Lindstrom, Rebecca Minton, Fran Rabe, Mathhew Short, Billy W. Blackwell, Mari Stamper and Matt Perry.
I had a great time chatting with these very nice and friendly folks. However, I was unable to watch their movie, for reasons I will explain shortly.
Jerry WilliamsThis unassuming friendly soul owes me about ten minutes of my life back. He was advertised in the schedule as a 'A self-described no budget filmmaker with a growing cult following in Kentucky. His film "Love's Memory Lost" is described as his 'latest surreal and dark short film.' Yeah, that's one way to describe it. I might describe it as "Jerry Williams attempts to produce the singularily simultaneously most boring and annoying film in the history of film-making." I must admit, he succeeded admirably. When I first met him, based on his bio, I immediately handed him a dollar bill so he could no longer describe himself as a 'no-budget' director. Afterall, a budget of $1 is still a budget. When his film ended, I tried to decide whether I should applaud politely or do nothing at all. After a moment of reflection I decided that I would be doing a disservice to humanity if I did anything to encourage him to continue producing these forms of audio/video torture; so I booed. I also shouted out to him, across the theatre, to please refund my dollar. I think he took it in good humour, I just didn't have it in my heart to encourage him any more.
Another actor in the lobby, I can't remember her name or which film she was in.
The director of Manic. A short horror film that prevented me from watching 'Zombie Planet' I can't remember this guys name, but he was a really nice fellow. Unfortunately, his film was not something I could sit through.
Ok, first of all, before I sound like I'm bashing anyone, I have to say, these were all really nice people. Apparently there is a Kentucky tradition of making home brewed horror films, not unlike making moonshine. These folks like to experiment with makeup and faux gore, and god love 'em for it. However, I do not personally watch horror of any kind. I find it spiritually destructive and I do not like to expose myself to it in any way and any form. So, duh, I obviously should not have shown up to a presentation of something called "Zombie Planet" in the first place. What did I expect, goofy campy fun?
So, now on to the reivew. The theatre was an awesome venue. The first persentation was a short film, approximately 10 minutes, called "Love's Memory Lost" by Jerry Williams. I can't imagine it was done on purpose, but I suppose it was. The video quality was so poor it was offensive to the eyes to watch. It was more static than movie, which was visually annoying. And..annoying was the theme of the day. The film comprised long shots of pages of a book with lines from a poem. These establishing shots would often last as long as a minute, providing enough time to read the paragaph and memorize it. Beyond that, the film would show the director wearing a lame mask and making faces at the camera and showing other characters doing nothing, for exceptionally long periods of time. So, you might say, this is just stupid, but not annoying per se. Well, that is true, however the composer/director decided that he would create a soundtrack comprised of the most annoying sounds ever invented by mankind. Imagine the most irratating sound you can, and then play that back at high decibal range and repeated for ten minutes solid. I 'watched' the entire film with my fingers plugged in my ears and even then it only reduced the intensity of the pain.
Well, this film was annoying and boring, but not offensive. Then the next film started, called "Manic". It was not in the program and was a last minute addition. It started out fine, with decent video quality and at least a story-line to follow. Compared to the previous short film, it was a high budget action flick. It began with a couple of stoned guys on a lonely road. They were attacked by an individual at the end of the scene, and I had Alex cover his eyes when I saw it coming. What came next, however, was too much for me. It then began to run a montage of butchered human body parts. Like I said, I don't know what I was expecting, but this was not something that I could sit through. I grabbed Alex and we headed for the door. I never did get to see the Zombie Planet movie, but I imagine I will survive without it.
Since I had Alex all ready to watch a movie, I decided to find a movie theatre to watch a Hollywod film. Alex and I went to see the latest Matrix movie. After all of the reviews my expectations were extremely low. Since my expectation were so low, I actually enjoyed the film. It was visually stunning and if you just let it wash over your senses it was an adequate way to kill some time. Looking at Persephone's tits didn't hurt either.
After the movie Alex and I returned to the hotel and caught one last band. There was a heavy metal band in the Patterson ballroom. Once again, there were more people in the band than there were audience members. Which was a real shame, because these guys were awesome. They were playing their hearts out just so Alex and I could be awash in their glory. At this point, I decided that we had all of the conference experience worth having and decided to return on Saturday instead of today as we originally had planned.
Saturday morning I attended our final game panel and it went very well. I said my goodbye's and Alex and I returned for the six hour road trip, listening to an entire book on tape for the trip. We listened to Dave Barry's "Tricky Business". It is probably a decent book, but I still have to get adjusted to listening to books on tape. I don't mind when a narrator just reads a book, but I can't stand when they try to do all of the 'voices' for the characters. In this case the voices were really bad, and did not add to the story. Nevertheless, it killed time and made the trip home easier.
So, that's my blow by blow account of our first MEIC conference. If it didn't piss off too many people, I think the ingredients for a really successful conference are there. I enjoyed the time I spent with my peers and I think the film festival and all of the music acts make it a great atmosphere. Perhaps I'll go next year afterall.
The conference is the brainchild of Stephen Zimmer, a remarkably mellow and laid back fellow. The conference was a huge success and an abject failure at the same time. Give Stephen credit for assembling such an incredible collection of talent for a conference in Lexington, Kentucky. There must have been fifty bands, film makers, and industry leaders from the field of comics and video games. I definitely felt the conference had value personally, if for no other reason to get a chance to interact with my peers in the game industry. On the other hand, it would have been nice if, after all of the hard work Stephen did to line up this array of talent, he managed to get an audience too. Touring bands which normaly play to a packed house usually had more people on stage than they did in the audience. In the game panels, we would have more industry veterans on the panel than the handful of University of Kentucky students who wandered in out of curiousity. I think the ingredients for a successful conference in the future are here, so long as too many people aren't pissed off at the lack of audience this year. I felt really bad for the bands, who must have thought this was a chance for them to get discovered by a major record label. They had made up flyers, promotional CD's, and went through a lot of trouble getting their equipment set up to play for no one. Often times the venues were cramped. I saw one band which had to pack all of their sound equipment in the corner of a run down smokey bar, in a space literally 8 feet by 8 feet. Once they powered up, they nearly broke the windows in the bar.
The conference was horribly disoraganized. Venues were spread all over and extremely difficult to find. The conference guide was a rambling affair that made it difficult to find out when, where, or why anything was happening. And, there was a lot happening. Presentations, films, and bands playing in 10 different locations simultaneously every night. The film showcase was attended almost completely by the actors in the movie and maybe one or two audience members. A nice venue though, if you could find it.
Alex and I drove down Thursday morning in the new car. A nice straight shot from St. Louis to Kentucky on I64. It was a safe and uneventful trip. When we arrived we checked into the hotel and noticed one thing right away. Apparently, it is a state law in Kentucky that every single person must smoke, in every location and at every time. It was a bit overwhelming. We got our conference badges and tried to figure out what we were going to do. We did get a chance to chat with conference mastermind Stephen Zimmer and thank him for his hard work.
Alex and I decided to go check out some bands in the evening. We had a hard time finding where a band was playing. We tried to get to the "Phoeonix Ballroom", asssuming it was some place in the hotel when it turned out to be the name of a nightclub a couple of blocks away. After walking in circles for a while we finally found it, and went inside. The band was just setting up, so we had dinner. Here is Alex enjoying his plate of ribs.
After dinner we went upstairs to watch the band. We listened to about 4 songs. There were two bartenders who acted very irritated to be there. They complained they had no advance warning of the event and there had been no promotion. Considering there were a grand total of six people there, counting me and Alex, who were not with the band I could see their point. Here is an actual photograph of the actual band we listened to. And, no, we did not buy one of their CD's.
Since there were many bands playing at about 10 different venues I figured we should go check out another one. According to the schedule, bands should have been playing for over an hour. We walked many blocks trying to locate another venue. Eventually we found a street that should have had a band. We walked up and down it twice, but couldn't hear any music. Finally, we saw the place, "Mia's" and went inside. The band was still setting up, and we sat in an extremely smokey and cramped bar. Alex and I pulled up a chair and I ordered a beer. Alex busied himself playing games on my Pocket PC. Once the band started playing they had a bunch of audio problems. They had been stuffed into a corner, literally, the size of a closet. Their huge amps and speakers stacked to the ceiling, clearly designed to fill a much larger space. There was a power hum so loud it did not bode well for the actual music. As one would expect, it was loud and distorted, and we only stayed for one or two songs.
When we returned to the hotel Thursday evening we just crashed for the night, hopeful that the next day would be more fruitful.
On Friday morning the first gaming session began at 11am. After breakfast Alex and I went to go find the conference room. What we found was absolute confusion. In the schedule rooms were marked as A, B, C, etc. However, there were no rooms A, B, C in the Hotel. I went up to one of the guys who was in charge of the conference and he had no ideal where anything was at. Eventually, by the second day, there were signs put up to indicate which rooms were which, but even then they were spread out all over, with some found down two escalators and through a shopping mall and down a long hallway.
When we found the game track room it was simply a small meeting room with a table and seating for about 15 people. It began to look like there were going to be more presenters than audience members. Here is a photograph I took of the room. Including myself and Alex there were four presenters and three attendees. Once the thing got started, a few more people showed up and we held an open discussion on the topic "How to find a publisher." We shared these words of wisdom with a couple of University of Kentucky college students and one guy taking night school at the community college. I'm sure we set loose a force the game industry will soon have to reckon with.
The panelists were supposed to be Jacob Hawley and Michael Ely of TKO-Software and David Whatley of Simutronics. None of them showed up, so instead myself, Steve Reid of Red Storm, Tom Smith and Eric Nofsinger of High Voltage software acted as the panelists. While I don't really know how useful it was to the limited audience, I certainly enjoyed the exchange myself. Several times during the discussion Alex even piped in with a comment from the young gamers perspective.
After the panel Alex and I returned to the room, where I made him do homework for several hours while I read "Children of Dune" by Frank Herbert. I got so sick of reading the Brian Herbert novels that I had to re-read the Dune Trilogy just to re-experience how good it could be. I'm really looking forward to polishing it off with "The God Emperor Of Dune" which I have not read in a very long time.
Alex in the hotel room doing his 'homework', yeah....At 4:30pm we went back down to attend the session "Elements of Developing A Game Project : Overview of components in developing a gaming project, from conception, to design, to release". Speakers were supposed to be myself, Marc Mencher, Tom Smith, Steve Reid, David Howe and Jacob Hawley. Marc Mencher, David Howe and Jacob Hawley did not show up. Me, I went back to the room where we had the meeting in the morning. I got there early but there were already some people there chatting, so I sat on in. I had a nice exchange about artwork for about 15 minutes before I realized, this was clearly the wrong place! I checked the schedule and realized that my talk was supposed to be in Room C. I excused myself and took off trying to find 'Room C'; which turned out to be down two escalators, through a shopping mall, and down a long hallway. When I arrived Steve and Tom were already conducting the session and there were a reasonable number of audience members. Just with the nature of the discussion it ended up touching on the work environment, including the subject of crunches. I ended up expressing myself a bit too intensly on this topic and I should have left the subject well enough alone. Nevertheless, we imparted wisdom and generally scared a lot of college kids away from the idea of working in the game industry.
Alex and I went by the small expo being held and had a very pleasant conversation with comic book artist Mark Wheatley who is known for Frankenstein Mobster. We bought a signed copy and had a pleasant chat. His talk was the one I mistakenly interupted earlier in the day. He is a very talented individual and was a great guy to chat with.
Mark WheatleySince one of the tracks at the conference was for film-makers, I thought it would be cool to go see some movies. There was one film advertised as a post apocalyptic landscape where the end of the world had been caused by a bad fad diet drug. That sounded awful interesting. After dinner Alex and I finally found the movie theatre at the Student Center on the sprawling University of Kentucky campus. We had a lot of fun hanging out in the lobby talking to the directors and stars of the films we were about to watch. I have no idea what I was thinking though. I figured they would be, what, you know movies. I figured they might have a little bit of inappropriate content, but Alex is good at covering his eyes at the bad parts and I'm not one of those parents who thinks he will be scarred for life if he hear's the word 'fuck'.
Director and one of the stars of Zombie Planet.More of the stars of Zombie Planet. I don't know who all is who, but the cast includes Christopher Rose, Frank Farhat, Karl Gustav Lindstrom, Rebecca Minton, Fran Rabe, Mathhew Short, Billy W. Blackwell, Mari Stamper and Matt Perry.I had a great time chatting with these very nice and friendly folks. However, I was unable to watch their movie, for reasons I will explain shortly.
Jerry WilliamsThis unassuming friendly soul owes me about ten minutes of my life back. He was advertised in the schedule as a 'A self-described no budget filmmaker with a growing cult following in Kentucky. His film "Love's Memory Lost" is described as his 'latest surreal and dark short film.' Yeah, that's one way to describe it. I might describe it as "Jerry Williams attempts to produce the singularily simultaneously most boring and annoying film in the history of film-making." I must admit, he succeeded admirably. When I first met him, based on his bio, I immediately handed him a dollar bill so he could no longer describe himself as a 'no-budget' director. Afterall, a budget of $1 is still a budget. When his film ended, I tried to decide whether I should applaud politely or do nothing at all. After a moment of reflection I decided that I would be doing a disservice to humanity if I did anything to encourage him to continue producing these forms of audio/video torture; so I booed. I also shouted out to him, across the theatre, to please refund my dollar. I think he took it in good humour, I just didn't have it in my heart to encourage him any more.Another actor in the lobby, I can't remember her name or which film she was in.The director of Manic. A short horror film that prevented me from watching 'Zombie Planet' I can't remember this guys name, but he was a really nice fellow. Unfortunately, his film was not something I could sit through.Ok, first of all, before I sound like I'm bashing anyone, I have to say, these were all really nice people. Apparently there is a Kentucky tradition of making home brewed horror films, not unlike making moonshine. These folks like to experiment with makeup and faux gore, and god love 'em for it. However, I do not personally watch horror of any kind. I find it spiritually destructive and I do not like to expose myself to it in any way and any form. So, duh, I obviously should not have shown up to a presentation of something called "Zombie Planet" in the first place. What did I expect, goofy campy fun?
So, now on to the reivew. The theatre was an awesome venue. The first persentation was a short film, approximately 10 minutes, called "Love's Memory Lost" by Jerry Williams. I can't imagine it was done on purpose, but I suppose it was. The video quality was so poor it was offensive to the eyes to watch. It was more static than movie, which was visually annoying. And..annoying was the theme of the day. The film comprised long shots of pages of a book with lines from a poem. These establishing shots would often last as long as a minute, providing enough time to read the paragaph and memorize it. Beyond that, the film would show the director wearing a lame mask and making faces at the camera and showing other characters doing nothing, for exceptionally long periods of time. So, you might say, this is just stupid, but not annoying per se. Well, that is true, however the composer/director decided that he would create a soundtrack comprised of the most annoying sounds ever invented by mankind. Imagine the most irratating sound you can, and then play that back at high decibal range and repeated for ten minutes solid. I 'watched' the entire film with my fingers plugged in my ears and even then it only reduced the intensity of the pain.
Well, this film was annoying and boring, but not offensive. Then the next film started, called "Manic". It was not in the program and was a last minute addition. It started out fine, with decent video quality and at least a story-line to follow. Compared to the previous short film, it was a high budget action flick. It began with a couple of stoned guys on a lonely road. They were attacked by an individual at the end of the scene, and I had Alex cover his eyes when I saw it coming. What came next, however, was too much for me. It then began to run a montage of butchered human body parts. Like I said, I don't know what I was expecting, but this was not something that I could sit through. I grabbed Alex and we headed for the door. I never did get to see the Zombie Planet movie, but I imagine I will survive without it.
Since I had Alex all ready to watch a movie, I decided to find a movie theatre to watch a Hollywod film. Alex and I went to see the latest Matrix movie. After all of the reviews my expectations were extremely low. Since my expectation were so low, I actually enjoyed the film. It was visually stunning and if you just let it wash over your senses it was an adequate way to kill some time. Looking at Persephone's tits didn't hurt either.
After the movie Alex and I returned to the hotel and caught one last band. There was a heavy metal band in the Patterson ballroom. Once again, there were more people in the band than there were audience members. Which was a real shame, because these guys were awesome. They were playing their hearts out just so Alex and I could be awash in their glory. At this point, I decided that we had all of the conference experience worth having and decided to return on Saturday instead of today as we originally had planned.
Saturday morning I attended our final game panel and it went very well. I said my goodbye's and Alex and I returned for the six hour road trip, listening to an entire book on tape for the trip. We listened to Dave Barry's "Tricky Business". It is probably a decent book, but I still have to get adjusted to listening to books on tape. I don't mind when a narrator just reads a book, but I can't stand when they try to do all of the 'voices' for the characters. In this case the voices were really bad, and did not add to the story. Nevertheless, it killed time and made the trip home easier.
So, that's my blow by blow account of our first MEIC conference. If it didn't piss off too many people, I think the ingredients for a really successful conference are there. I enjoyed the time I spent with my peers and I think the film festival and all of the music acts make it a great atmosphere. Perhaps I'll go next year afterall.
