Vidshow Discussion Post: It's All Stories, Really

[cosmic_llin]

Welcome to the discussion post for the It's All Stories, Really vidshow, curated by Llin.

“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Whether or not you attended or supported the 2019 con, join us in the comments to chat about this show.

If you haven't watched them yet, or you'd like to refresh your memory, some vids from this show are available to stream on our site - scroll down this page and click on the show title to see the vids alongside their descriptions.

Friday Night Quiz and Group Vidding Workshop: How to Take Part

[vidukonnews]

Friday Night Quiz

The first official event of VidUKon 2020, the Friday Night Quiz is scheduled to begin at 18.15 BST (GMT+1) on the 12^th of June. As VidUKon 2020 is an entirely virtual convention this year, this means that the usual method of sorting people into teams during registration and then trapping them in a conference room and making them answer questions of varying degrees of obscurity won’t quite work this year.

This year, the quiz is going to be running through the VidUKon Discord server - for those not familiar with Discord, it’s a cross-platform chatting tool, that runs either in its own app or via a browser window. It’s free, supports video and chat streaming for up to 50 people at a time, and text chats for any number of people. The Discord server already has channels set up on it for general conversations about the quiz, the quiz questions, and for individual teams.

Once you’ve logged into Conline and registered for VidUKon 2020, you’ll be able to interact with the items on the convention schedule. If you select the Quiz in the schedule, you can pre-register for it, confirming that you’ll be around for the quiz as it’s happening on the Friday night. The plan is to use this to set up as many teams as possible in advance, to cut down on the setup time on the night and to give people an opportunity to get in touch with each other ahead of the convention if they want to, as anyone who registers in advance will get to see in advance which team they’re in. One of the useful things you can do in Discord is set up video and audio chats between members in Direct Message groups, so in theory, there’s nothing to stop you setting up chat conversations ahead of the convention that no-one else would be able to eavesdrop on…

You can still join in the quiz on the Friday night without registering, but if you do decide to join in without pre-registering, please turn up at least 15 minutes early to give the concom a chance to sort you into a team. I’m not saying that we’re using an actual sorting hat, but there may be magic involved.

For those who’ve never had the chance to be in the quiz before, the format is 40 questions, split into 8 categories of 5 questions each. Some of the categories may involve questions based on pictures. Some of the questions are much more obscure than others, and we’re relying on the honour system for working out the answers, so please don’t google the answers during the quiz, as that would make me sad, and then I’d be a big mopey lump hanging around in the con space, like the Incredible Sulk, only heavier and less green.

 

Group Vidding Workshop

So, there’s going to be a Group Vidding Workshop at VidUKon 2020, where we split into teams and each edit a section of a song to form a complete vid. We’ve hosted three of these before, and each time the resulting vid has been a fascinating work of art, a Frankenvid for the ages, and a cause for celebration!

Would I lie to you?

This year, circumstances are a little bit different from previous years. For a start, we’ve far more people attending the convention than usual – 94 of us, at last count – and that’s going to make a difference to the length of song, and the number of vidding teams we need. And there’s a pandemic going on.

We’ll also have a number of people attending from timezones far removed from VidUKon’s home timezone. The magic of Conline, the online platform LithiumDoll has created to host online VidUKon, gives the option to attend the con in your own time zone and still experience other people’s reactions as if they were happening in real time. Nifty, right?

This has some implications for the Group Vidding Workshop and its scheduling, of course. A team working together on a section of the Frankenvid will have to do so if not from the same time zone, then at least at the same time.

Another tricky point is source distribution. Each team will be provided with two movies to use as a vidding source. Usually, we would hand these out on memory sticks, but at a virtual con, we’ll have to get a bit more creative.

To get all of this sorted, Teyla and I are working to get things prepared, but we could really do with some information from people in advance, to help us get as much set up as we can before the weekend of the convention.

This is what we’re planning for the workshop:

     ·   From experience, ideal vidding team size is 4 people, so that’s what we’re going with

·         Each team will get approximately 20 seconds of timeline to complete

·         The workshop will be held on the Saturday, and the vid prepared at our end on the Sunday

·         Each team will need a vidding focus, i. e. the person actually laying down the clips for the 20 seconds of timeline that group is completing

·         The person serving as vidding focus will have to be willing to share their screen with other members of the team. Discord allows this for Windows users, and Skype and Zoom allow it for Windows and other platforms

·         They will have to have a vidding program and be able to download around 2 GB of source material

 Whether we can make the Group Vidding Workshop work is going to hinge around whether we have enough people willing to be the focus for each team – so I’d like to ask for volunteers, so that we can start setting groups up ahead of the convention.

 When you register on Conline, you have the option to set your timezone. That’s used for determining at what time the convention runs online through Conline for you. If you click on the Group Vidding Workshop in the VidUKon 2020 schedule on Conline, you should see the options for signing up, such as confirming you want to join in, and what timezones you’re available in. We’ll be using the responses from this to pull teams together that are at least roughly in the same timezone, and the reason for asking for your availability (as distinct from your actual timezone) is so that if you’re happy to flex your viddng time by a couple of hours in order to join a team that’s in a timezone near you.

You can also volunteer to be a designated vidder for a team. If you volunteer to be a vidding focus, we’ll be contacting you with the details for a small sample file to download. It’s a short segment of movie in the common format that all of the vidding sources have been prepared in, so that you can check to see if your vidding software is happy with it. Closer to the con, we’ll confirm details like the people hopefully joining your team, and the download details for the two sources randomly selected for you, to give you a chance to download them ahead of the convention and confirm that they work for you. Ideally, you’ll be able to get in contact with the other people in your team to confirm how you’d like to vid together.

Barring any disasters, just ahead of the Group Vidding Workshop you’ll be passed the download link for the segment of song corresponding to your team, and the easy part begins – actually vidding!