SMASH! News

SMASH! is on tomorrow and you know that feeling where you’re filled with dread and excitement all at the same time? That’s what it’s like at the moment. Everyone was hard at work setting up the venue today and it’s looking really nice. Of course, when the building looks as beautiful as it does, you don’t need to do that much.

Our guests have all arrived and are raring to go and they’re really looking forward to meeting you all. We think you’re going to hit it off. And let’s not forget the Bandai Action Kit Universal Cup. By this time tomorrow two people will know they’re going to Hong Kong to represent Australia. What legends those chaps from Hobbyco are.

People don’t use the word ‘chaps’ enough any more.

And now I’m at that point where you wonder if it’s worth going to bed or if you should just stay up all night. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

You know those cool scenes in war movies where the generals are all gathered around a table in a war room staring at a map?

Well, we had our own planning session.

More photos are up at Flickr.

We’ve created a little countdown page that lets you know how many days, hours, minutes and seconds until SMASH! this year.

Why did we do this? Well because Tom said he’d like a clock that counted down how much time was left until doors open in August and when Tom says do something we usually dither around for a bit, watch Doctor Who, laugh at Turkish Rambo, dance to Korean Pop and then, depending on our mood, do it.

Speaking of which, we’ve created a countdown timer. The code is based on Alexandru Pitea’s excellent tutorial at Nettuts+ but with some extra special love from SMASH!. Feel free to borrow the code yourself!

Hello, Rob here.

Some of the hyper-observant amongst you may have noticed we’ve updated the layout of the Details drop down menu (the menu that flies out when you hover your cursor over the word ‘Details’ at the top of the screen). Hopefully the new layout of the menu makes it easier to find the details you’re looking for.

You’ll also notice that we’ve added two new pages. We’re lucky enough to have had a huge influx of new people expressing interest in the con and, while Wikipedia is great, well, it is Wikipedia. So that’s why we wanted to put up a page setting out the History and the structure of the Organisation.

SMASH! is people, too.

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.

We inspected the venue for 2010 today.

We’re not quite ready to announce the dates and other details for SMASH! 2010 but we are close. I’m pleased to say that we have never been as advanced in our planning as we are this year.

And already we have a bunch of cool things organised (and it’s only February!). But because we’re organised we have a plan for promotion and the plan says we mustn’t talk about Fight Club. If I do, Nadia comes and breaks my face. (I may be the President but she’s the Promotions Director and, I’m told, therefore far more important than I am.)

So you’re just going to have to wait until February 15. So set your phone alarm and check back then for our official announcement about SMASH! 2010.

In the meantime, we inspected the venue for 2010 today. It looked good. *glances nervously at Nadia* That is all.

So 2010 is SMASH!’s fourth year and when you get to year 4 some things have to change. In the case of SMASH!, it’s email addresses. In years past we were pretty lax when it came to naming schemes. We let people use nicknames, first names, made up names — I think we might have even had a princesstutu for a while there.

No more! The IT Nazis have decreed that it’s time to look a little more professional. We’ve got an official naming scheme happening and today we finally cleaned up all our old email addresses. If you send something to an old email address it will eventually make it to the right person, so fear not. Just don’t be surprised if the reply comes from tutu.smith@smash.org.au.

We realise, on one level, that being all professional is not as much fun as just winging it but, you know what, neither are pants. And there comes a point at which society looks down on you when you go outside with pants. Why? WE DON’T KNOW.

OK, so it’s really sort of the night before the night before AVCon but that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

AVCon is almost upon us and Nadia, Justin and myself are heading down to the Festival City to karaoke it up. Or to allow others to karaoke it up, I suppose, since our job is to run their karaoke setup down there (the song list is here). If you’re going, be sure to swing by and say Hello!

Since we’re getting to the pointy end of our own convention, we’re somehow squeezing this in around everything else. Nadia has been working overtime getting our programme booklet done (it looks great!) while I’ve been busy with getting some last minute things for ticketing working. Justin is meanwhile busy writing run sheets for the main stage so that everything runs smoothly on the day (famous last words).

We’ll be taking photos over the weekend and will hopefully have them straight up on Flickr if we’re able to get all the technical stuff working while we’re down there. If not, it’ll be the first thing we do on our return

Here at the SMASH! HQ we’re lucky to have a bunch of talented designers and developers working on the design and development of our web site. As a consequence, I don’t think it’s wrong to say we’ve got one of the best-looking anime convention sites on the net. Of course we do it for you, dear potential attendee, but I thought it was worth writing a little post here to let you know that this kind of thing doesn’t come without a lot of sweat and tears (mostly tears).

As I write this it is 1:31 am in the morning. I have just finished getting the new splash page operating correctly after our ace web developer Rob got it to within an inch of being perfect. Try as he could Rob couldn’t quite work out what was wrong. Since I was partly responsible for the original design that became the 2009 site (and since he had to go to bed), Rob passed it over for me to look at. After reading the tutorial that comes with the plugin a couple of dozen times and removing a great deal of the remaining hair on my head I was about to throw in the towel when I thought, ‘Why not see if we’re running the latest version of jQuery?’

And now the site works perfectly.

Ace developer, my ass.

So I helped start Animania in 2002 and one of the questions I’ve heard every time I’ve worked on a convention is from some poor con-goer who wanted to know why a particular vendor wasn’t there. This year I’m in charge of Vendor Relations for SMASH! and I’ve been trying as hard as I can to make sure we’ve got a variety of different vendors. Still, I’m sure someone out there is going to ask: How come you don’t have [insert vendor]? Here are the answers:

1. We didn’t give them enough time
For interstate vendors, especially, coming all the way up (or down) to Sydney is no small undertaking. Unfortunately, we at SMASH! didn’t work harder in the months of January, February, and March to give all our vendors the necessary heads up so they could get ready. No excuses for next year!

2. We’re not a good economic proposition
For some vendors, coming to SMASH! just doesn’t make commercial sense. Although we do our best to keep prices low coming to a convention isn’t just about the table fee. There’s the staff you have to organise, there’s transport to get all your stuff out there… and at the end of the day there’s the uncertainty that you just don’t know whether you’re going to get that much out of it. This year is SMASH!’s first two-day convention and so for a lot of vendors who knows how many people are even going to turn up? We’re pretty confident the answer is ‘a lot’ but Mike’s gut feeling isn’t always enough to satisfy the bean counters.

3. We didn’t ask
This one is again really our fault since thanks to the Internet there really is no excuse for not knowing that an anime vendor exists but the honest truth is I’ve been surprised this year by just how many vendors have contacted us. And these are vendors I had never heard of. Unfortunately we’re not at the point a lot of other established conventions are where everyone knows who you are. Next year, next year…

4. We didn’t have enough room
You could be forgiven for looking at those rather sparse vendor pages and thinking no one is coming. Fear not, humble SMASH! attendee-in-waiting! I can assure you not having enough vendors is not the problem, rather it looks like we’ll have too many (a better problem to have to be sure). Look forward to an explosive update this weekend!

So there you have it: our first Behind the Scenes post. Some of the things don’t make us look good but frankly if they don’t that’s our fault. We should have done a better job. Getting it out there so you know about it is the best way to keep us honest.

Want more Behind the Scenes action? Let us know in the comments!