Ohayocon '05

Ohayocon always has this unusual vibe for us and our show, but like a lot about the con itself, we seem to succeed in spite of it ^^. Personally it was probably one of my more trying shows, but it’s still always awesome to do once the lights go down so to speak.

Anyway, the 'new' twist rich lather and I created for this Hell, was Choose Your Fate, which enabled audience members to somewhat control the ride into the abyss...

We started the show approximately 50 minutes late, and curtailed the show at about 12:40, making it a bit under two hours, which in our opinion is just fine for our ‘satellite’ Hell show,

The technical issues were huge and awful, and extremely surprising given the room. It was the main events room for the con, had two amazingly good quality rearscreen projectors on either side of a huge stage, and the room is bigger than any Hell venue outside of ACen & AWA. Rich & I poked our heads in the night before during something (AMVs maybe) and from a distance looked at the centralized tech desk and things looked cool, no way we thought could they not have the huge majority of the things we’d need the following night. Besides, they’ve known for weeks what we need and we’d covered a lot of bases ourselves.

Well…..things tend not to work out so well in Hell… Get there, no video playing devices of any kind at the tech desk. Fine, we’ve got dvd players, and have items that if need be we don’t need to show (ie vhs only). Well, problem #2, they have a ‘mixer’, that has 3 inputs..but it’s a scan converter so only 1 input is actual composite video (S), the other two inputs are VGA for outputting computer video to screen…So we’ve got 1 video input, so after kibbutzing, they were trying all sorts of weird things, and I just told them to stack three machines (2 dvd, 1 vcr), run everything through the vcr, and I’d make due with switching back and forth from front and back inputs on the vcr channel select as my makeshift switch. This would have been more than fine and cool, but one DVD player just wouldn’t play right, it would freeze audio or lose one channel entirely. Everything from a bad vcr input jack, bad cables, etc was guessed at to no difference. Oh and did I mention that the vcr started eating tapes? That basically left us doing the entire show with one dvd player without a previewing capability. Much adlibbing and covering took place on the mic when we had to go from disc to disc ^^; Oh and btw, we discovered the real problem with the players (the audio problem Rich mentioned about on the forums)..at about 2:45AM!, during the next to last midnight madness parody. This problem also had caused us to not show ReDeath (yeah that got us quite the reception :P ) when I randomly discovered that the audio popped back to life by taking *OUT* one of the audio cables (the right one I think :P). we did get to show ReDeath, to all of about 15 people that were left at 3AM from the probably 500 who would have seen it 2 hours earlier.

We started with a custom made version of the ‘Day of Doomsday’ movie theater open, followed up by CPF’s Jar of Screaming Blood & Twister II (give a little of the ‘horror’ theme the con had used for this year). We introduced this year our new feature, Ohayocon Anime Hell, Choose Your Fate. I took pretty much all of the Hell material I have captured digitally, numbered them 1-116 and put them on 2 discs. Monty Hall-style, Rich would take the mic out into the audience and selected audience members to pick the # they wanted to see. It worked out better than we hoped, in part because it enabled us to use it as a vamping spot where distraction could be made from me whilst I was grappling with the tech stuff.

Our List of items we were running no matter how the show flowed:
Staplerfahrer Klaus *
Fish Fight! * - by far the two most well received bits on the show, we’ve got two
new ‘staples’. Even got a nice girl come up inquiring about it because she’s decided now to organize a Fish Fight cosplay group ^^.
5 Neat Guys
Gun vs. Katana
Gavv’s *new* L.A.V.A. segment – will tell in private, otherwise it spoils the gag (which by random karma very next clip was selected by the audience was the Sailor Moon L.A.V.A.)

Fate List – those that chose wisely and/or poorly
Titanic 2 Rap (#13)
Doc talks about Masturbation (#69) (let it run into #70, Booby Traps-Private Snafu)
Gaylaxicon 2000 (#42) (followed directly into Hotel Room UV Light bit)
Farting Evangelist II
My Friend God
Sailor Moon L.A.V.A.
Turkish Star Trek
Kool-Aid Kool
Live & Learn – Gas Fire, Roof Jump (amazing, literally while we were trying to figure out what to do, since the vcr had just eaten the vhs tape where I had the PSA tapes cued & I forgot I had vidcapped one small part of it)
Coleco Telstar (on the disc it flows well into Old Glory Insurance, which we then turned into the impromptu MvR segment with Bathroom Monkey and Monkey vs Robot)
Grand Theft Auto trailer (led to Grand Prix/Red Line 7000 trailer)
Katana Incident

Other items that we flowed into at points following Fate selections:
Old Glory Insurance, Bathroom Monkey, Monkey vs Robot, Grand Prix/Red Line 7000 trailer, Fensler GI Joe (sacked,cliff), original Heino segment, Cartoons & You, CPF Signs, some misc commercials…

gavv