25 February 2010
Making an Announcement
When we managed to secure three international guests we really wanted to make a big announcement about it. So the first thing we did was swear everyone on the committee to secrecy. I’m not saying there was a blood oath but I’m not not saying there was a blood oath.
It was hard not to blab to everyone we knew. We all have friends who don’t work on the convention and you know what it’s like: as soon as you have some cool news you want to tell everyone. But we wanted it to be a surprise and in the age of Twitter and Facebook just telling your friends means just telling everyone.
When it came time to work out how we were going to do things on the front page we thought through a few different ideas. We could’ve just splashed the announcement on there, but we felt that if we did that people might not read the blog post. They’d just see the picture, close the tab. No, we wanted something to draw people in. But how do you do that without it looking like a pathetic tease? You don’t just want to put something in big type.
The idea of a 50s news announcement came up and, well, we couldn’t help ourselves. This is the best part of working on SMASH!. We really spent a good hour or two doing this which, when you think about it, was probably a waste of time. And then again maybe it’s what makes the difference.
