Doing some desktop cleanup before Year-End I
excavated my thoughts on EF21, which I apparently forgot to add to this thread.
Eurofurence 21 was my 14. EF, starting with EF 8. What a long way we have come! As every year, I'm very impressed by what a bunch of crazy, creative, determined individuals of the best Fandom I know are capable of pulling of.
Since I'm staff, my focus was partly on different things than other attendees. On top of that I find that I've got many memories of PPS-preparations which spring easily to mind when thinking about EF, but are now more than a year old. Funny thing, those human brains :)
Let's begin with the stage. It was BOMBASTIC! Such a great, splendid, huge, colorful, rich stage. Lots of space, lots of lights, lots of eye-candy - like the DMX-Controlled fursuit fan. And Lasers! We had fucking Lasers, for the first time we actually dared bringing some and they rocked (8x 3 Watt, 1x 12W). A great THANKS to everyone who made this stage possible!
I also enjoyed the huuge projection screen. Did you know it was more widescreen than intended? The back projection partly hit the rails of the top level, casting some shadows, so the lower fifth had to be covered. But seeing the very nice EF21 logo very big there, pumping and dancing to the music, felt great. I really hope we can have such a distinctive logo back.
My personal highlight was a live video conference (using Skype) to the charity at the closing ceremony. That's something I'm grown up with on big TV events, not "private parties". I had the chance to watch from beside the A/V-Technician and thus could see their deeply moved faces while they were 'on hold' during the first part of the closing. Oh, I also saw a printer spitting out some heaps of paper labelled "Closing Ceremony Script" back in Conops shortly before it was scheduled to start - "EF just in time productions", as usual :)
During teardown I noticed that someone had replaced the "Escape route plan" on the wall (which is mandatory for such buildings) with a special one just for our EF stage. Cool.
And that was just the MAIN stage - we had two more stages, and on Saturday night all three of them were used and quite crowded.
Next to that was the Fursuit lounge. Big and chilling, the team provided a good place for retreat and change there. Plenty of everything - well, could there EVER be enough paw dryers?
One thing to look out for: the huge fans collect quite some dirt. Touching them, especially the backside, would get you black stains, so be careful there. We noticed one night and a few guys from our security even tried to clean it, though I suspect next day that could be dirty again. So watch out - not too close fan-hugging.
Additionally I saw our security several times walking around with water bags, making sure our fursuiters stayed well hydrated, and not only during the dances & parade. That was a very nice touch, thanks for that!
Only downside was the long hallway betwee stage, artshow, fursuit lounge (called "ECC B"), used as queueing area. Compared to the rest, it was dimly lit, quite boring. Fortunately I never had to actually wait there.
I really enjoy the furry convention atmosphere - "flooding a hotel with fluff". And, well, technology. Though I also enjoy the small touches. Like the TV which was set up next to the registration area, showing the (updated) timetable. That was a nice thing. And it got repurposed appropriately on the last day, showing a live view from the dances. And someone wrote in the "next upcoming event" scroller: "
EF 22 starts in
1 year". I really like such humor.
The decoration was mixed. It was not really that much this year, unfortunately (change of responsibilities and thus lack of experience and time, I'd guess), but what was there looked great.
It mainly was a nice 'Eurofurance' banner series and a great and big piece in the hallway, which doubled as photo background (good idea!).
Also the conops office had some nice decorations on a side-table.
Also the conbook was splendid! It looked gorgeous, and I especially liked the little pictograms depicting the rules (like CFz did before already). Though, to be honest, I didn't find ANY time on-site to actually READ the conbook. Luckily I got access to the proof-reading version beforehand, so I had some idea what was in it.
From what I gathered, our press team did a great job, too. Very professional. We don't need any evangelists for luring new people in the fandom (Disney will do that for us), but we do need to leave a good impression so that the hotels and locals continue to have us in a good view. Our press team is a vital part in this strategy.
I enjoyed the camp fire (even though I wasn't allowed to put some colors into it, awwww), the nice design of the badge and the roomcard (even though quite some got confused that a "key" was printed on it, but you had to insert the card the other way round), the detailed travel information by doco (long-range) and Sirana (Berlin-internal) in the forums, the "Zaster Laster" (mobile money ATM) in front of the hotel, and our security. They are more visible now, with their new clothing and especially the scooters (damn, that's one thing to be jaelous :), but were always nice and visibly present. Big applause for our tireless security volunteers!
Quite some hotel employees had badges or even little 'furry ears'. I was especially happy when I was told this was done entirely voluntarily - which I'd believe, given that they were quite unique. A mandatory "make the client happy" policy would probably look like everyone wearing the exact same china knockoff ears, which wasn't the case. It really makes me happy when we can spread our fun also to those service employees catering to us.
Ah, there had been some parts which could be improved, surely. The elevator situation is not optimal, I'd totally love to use the stair cases especially on the lower floors, but that was forbidden unfortunately. Then additional trashcans had been put up, next to the elevators. But they were labelled "ReFood", which is a company specialising in food left-overs. I was quite hesitant to use them, as I wasn't sure which kind of waste would be acceptable there (hopefully they could just add a printed A4 label to it next year?).
Also I had the impression that the air conditioning was a bit extreme. After quite some hot days, the wheather got much colder the week of EF, but still the cooling was on. Especially in the ECC (the part behind the Rotunda, where the stages, artshow, lounge were) I was constantly on the edge of freezing. Even worse for the poor people on the FoH, sitting directly underneath the cold air outlet. This made our experience a bit uncomfortable and contributed to our Con Crud :(
I am also somewhat unhappy with those smokers. I don't really mind that they are smoking somewhere (where I'm not), but leaving/entering the hotel through the main doors forced us to go through quite a crowd of smokers. I felt somewhat uncomfortable doing this in fursuit, knowing how much secondary smoke clings even to normal clothing which can be washed more easily.
And I don't really understood why housekeeping appeared to keep changing our towels even though we clearly did not put them on the ground, despite their little flyers asking us to re-use them. However I never had any other issues with them, they left us alone if we were still sleeping long after a night of partying, and I never got the impression that they touched anything else than the beds and towels.
But everything combined, great EF again. My personal experience:
Breakfast was very good, but for me it was quite tough to be awake at those times. I did manage more often than last year, tough :)
Several times I'd have wished for an indoor-localisation-app, for meeting people who were, like me, roaming around and hard to actually meet.
I managed to attend one panel, the Self-Motivation one by Eosfoxx, which was very good.
On Friday I got a migraine attack, which ruined most of the day for me :( (thanks to Greex for some medication), after some hours of sleeping I managed to watch the Swiss Pawpetshow. As expected, simpler than our EF PPS and they also had the benefit of doing it in our native tongue (German). But nice show, I did enjoy it.
The BigBlueDance had soooo muuuuch energyyy... I planned on going to a room party (which I actually really, really wanted to), but quickly cancelled that. I just had way too much fun dancing.
The Deaddog Dance was not really my taste - just like the DDD at CFz, where we also fleed the room (might have been the same DJ?). But later that night the music changed and it got really bouncy again. A very nice closing.
Thanks to everyone - staffers, panelist, volunteers, fursuiters and who else contributes some part of this magic - for making such a great convention!
And since these notes have been sitting on my desk for so long, I can already say: looking forward to EF 22 :)
