Since the question will inevitably come up what those special challanges may be, here's a little peek behind the scenes for you:
Moving the Main Stage Area to the Convention Center.
The main stage area is going to move to Convention Center Hall A in 2015. This means, that literally everything becomes an order of magnitude more complicated within the stage deparment. A room and a stage of this size requires entirely new concepts, making the experience we gained this year with the new stage in the Estrel Hall essentially worthless. The new setup will be a tremendous challenge for our stage team to operate as it is without the Pawpetshow involved. It will require more than a dozen paid professionals to get it set up in time, and entirely new dimensions of safety regulations, liabilities and technical challenges will come upon us. In the first year, we absolutely need to limit the complexity to an amount we can handle with confidence. This time there will not be a pre-built stage environment that we can use as a base. The Convention hall is just an empty space, and building a Pawpet stage essentially doubles the complexity of the main stage setup. It can be done, but it takes extra experience we don't yet have.
Coping with Limited Function Space Availability
And as if things weren't already hard enough, we won't be able to start setup before Monday evening because of competing business conventions filling up the preceding slot to the last minute. Stage construction will have to go on continuously for 48 hours without interruptions in order to get the setup finished in time. Hired professionals will work in three shifts to get it done. The pawpet stage is the part with the lowest priority, and if they ran out of time for any reason, the first bit to suffer.
Funding Challenges
We managed to hit the Estrel's room cap in our very first year. That's a great achievement, but it also means that we will definitely not experience the same growth spurt again next year. The costs however will go up significantly, and out budget will be very tight . The Pawpet Show stage alone will add more than ten thousand Euros in setup and hardware costs, and after that, there might not be enough money left for an actual show on that stage. So we'd rather save the money for the pawpet stage setup in our first year at the ECC, and use the remaining Pawpetshow budget to improve our next show.
Loss of rehearsal facilities
Unfortunately, the workshop in Hünxe which has been our home base during the last three years, will no longer be available for us next year. Until we find a new affordable space within driving range of the majority of our team members, there can not be a new production. Finding a good rehearsal space is very difficult. It can take months or even years, because there are so many requirements to be fulfilled.
Reorganization of the Production Process
We've come to the conclusion that our production process needs to become more predictable, and that we need to reduce the workload at the convention. We need a better administration of tasks, more precise effort estimates, and definitely a more detailed design process. We need to know the status of the production at any time, and many design and construction processes need to start much earlier. We need to change our rehearsal stage setup to more closely resemble the real stage setup, so we have a much better idea about the mechanics of every single scene, and we can preproduce the support structures for props and backdrops ahead of time. All this takes time to implement, and it can hardly be done under the pressure of an already running production.
Reducing timetable dependencies at the con
We are thinking about re-scheduling the Pawpetshow to Friday evening to reduce the possible impact that a delay might have. It also gives us the opportunity to have a proper closing ceremony on Saturday night, and even gives our own team the chance to properly celebrate the last evening. However, we can only do this if we are absolutely sure that we can spare that one extra day of emergency buffer space. And for that, we first need to re-design our production process as described above - and that will take longer than the time we have until EF21.
Giving everyone a rest
I've given up pretty much all my other hobbies in favor of Eurofurence and the Pawpet Show. I've let down friends and family to attend meetings and rehearsals, I didn't have a proper birthday party in a decade, and my blood pressure is approaching lethal values. I need a break, and I'm not the only one. We've never been that close to burning ourselves out. Some team members have already announced their resignment, or at least a time out. They're right, we all need to take a step back, and tend to ourselves and our social life again for some time. We're going to stay in touch, there will be meetings and workshops throughout the year, and we are going to work on the new show. Just without that insane, soul-crushing crunch time before the con. It's essential to reduce the pace or we are going to lose our volunteers - and our sanity.
Reinforcing our Team
Adding more time is one thing, but we also need to reduce the total workload per person. Some of us just have too many things to do at the same time. Sinking between 500 and 1000 work hours into a project every year for more than a decade will wear out even the toughest enthusiast. We need to grow our team, so everyone can have more predictable, more specific tasks, and we can get stuff done earlier. But finding new volunteers who fit in and who have the necessary skills and motivations, is very hard and takes a long time. "Keepers of the light" was a great showcase of what we are capable of, and maybe we can recruit new members at the convention, who knows?
