The last months have been a bit of a relentless string of talks, meetings, developments and – thankfully – progress with the show for this year and the NVA. A few weeks ago Matt pushed the button (or threw the lever, as he would have it) on the first release of the new site and suddenly everything about the festival gathers pace.
There’s something especially liberating about committing to dates, getting the first meaningful piece of news out there always tends to accelerate progress.
We’re trying something a little different with the GC site this year, in that we’re making a conspicuous attempt to document the process and progress of the project. Partially this is a matter of record, something we’ve always been less than brilliant at maintaining – but more it’s about trying to tangibly make good on some of the promise of the whole exercise. The homespun openness which has characterised previous events we’re trying to make real in involving people in more practical ways. Hence, most of the comment about GameCity is likely to be moved to that site – unless it’s so horrendously off-message as to be inappropriate.
In other news – delivered a workshop on festival production to 20-odd young people last week where a couple of memorable things happened.
#1 : During showing some retrospective piccies of previous events, for the first-time *ever* someone shouting out in recognition at seeing an image of Abe from Oddworld.
#2 : During an exercise where they were tasked with rapidly identifying the hallmarks of a brilliant festival, one of them wrote down – “unbelievable”. This is a sound aim and something I’ve now added to the top of our aspirations for this year.
The NVA continues to motor on at an alarmingly splendid pace, but more of that later…