Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

Beyond The Loading Screen: May

May?  What is May?  The fifth month on my calendar is called “Anime North.”  That said, it’s not like this month wasn’t beneficial to my career.

The YA Project
This one has been at a standstill due to certain parties being preoccupied with other commitments.  Seeing as one of those parties was Yours Truly, I cannot complain.

The TV Show
No one is watching the YouTube clips anymore.   I will keep an eye on it for another month, and then consider taking a different approach to getting fans.  I have an idea or two in the works, one of which involves a colab with someone I met at Anime North.  The other involves a skill I developed while making a game show for, you guessed it, Anime North.

The Company
Okay, here’s the big one.  I need to promote and sell my show, and during the con, I met some contacts who might help me do that.  Ironically, not one of them was encountered during my planned Networking Time.  It just goes to show you the value of always being prepared to take advantage of an opportunity as it presents itself.

Actually, this whole month was proof of the value of removing the boundary between work and fun.  When you are doing something progeeky, your work IS fun, and so even in your offtime, you are bound to discover things that can help you on your way.

Goals for June: follow up with the new contacts and get cracking on those new ideas for promoting my show.

-Tamara Hecht

ChibiCon and More

I just got back from my second year at ChibiCon, a small anime convention at Branham High School in San Jose.  It's a pretty neat idea; their anime club does a yearly mini-con with games, skits, and more.

I did two panels:
The Power of Brainstorming: This was a modified version of my usual panel which some of you have seen - with a new addition, applying the exercises to creating an anime/story.  The end result involved post-magical-apocalypse motorcycle gangs, a kind of Romeo and Juliet story, and an alien observer who had become stuck on earth (shades of Riverworld).  by the end of the event people were saying this had to be made.  Also Hetalia was involved, but we won't go into that.

The State of The Geekonomy: This is going to be a new feature at all or most cons Bonnie and I do.  It's a review of our trend-spotting, ala the Geek Scanner.  This went pretty good for the first time, though this was a condensed version.  It did keep people's attention, and I broke it up with some humor.  I think a half hour isn't enough time for a real interactive panel, but it was fun.  I think it'll be easier when I tag team with someone.

The con itself was nice and tight and simple.  I thought I'd add a few thoughts about it.

ChibiCon is a con run by a club thus 90% of the attendees are from the school or club; it is essentially a kind of club event done as a con.  However this idea works - it takes the "con concept" and applies it to a get-together.  People were joking and cosplaying and having fun, and it was obvious we were all enjoying ourselves.

Think of what a con is.  It's an organized series of events based around particular themes and interests that lets people have fun and socialize.  You could easily use the "con structure" to do similar events, turning your club or group's experience into a mini-convention, with all the benefits (and in some cases, less of the disadvantages).

I think this is something for a lot of us geeks, pro geek and otherwise, to consider.  We have all these examples of how to run interesting convention events, schedules, and happenings.  We know how to set up the LANs and organize the costly and run the videos.  Why not use that to build a fun event for your group or club?

And, to keep this progeeky, do some career events.  Hey, I'm available . . .

- Steven Savage

Anime St. George 2010 Con Report

I profiled Anime Saint George  early in my efforts to profile "profan" activities at cons, and was thrilled when the Con Chair invited me to be a guest of honor!  You don't really turn down an invitation like that, and I thought it might be a nice little vacation.

So let's get to the review!

Anime North Con Report

Convention Report: Anime North Fan To Pro panel.
I just got back from Anime North, where Bonnie and I did a panel on going fan to pro with several other great people - and we announced the blog publicly for the first time.

The panel consisted of:

• Myself (an IT Pro)
• Bonnie (publishing)
• Tim Carter, an office worker with a growing writing career, whose latest work is Epoch.
• A pair multitalented cosplayers/video editors/voice actors/grad students, Karen and JM Frey.

Attendance was decent and the audience was polite and serious.  I'm thinking that next time I do this to come up with a better title - Fan To Pro may be a good name for a blog, but it's not exactly a compelling title in a convention program (I'll take any suggestions).

The highlights:

• Tim discussing how he'd gotten published through sheer bloody-minded focus of effort - with copies of his novels.  Not only did it give him a bit of well-deserved publicity, but he really made the point of you want it, you work for it, and having an actual example of success has a good impact.
• A discussion on knowing what to do next in your career path went very well.  I used my experiences in IT (where I moved from programming to management) to start, Bonnie picked it up by discussing her transitions from travel to industry publishing, and "Vega" discussed her interesting ups and downs in doing voice acting.  Most everyone had something to say on it.
• The oft-forgotten idea of doing things for free to enhance and display talent or flesh out a portfolio was discussed by JM and Karen - they're currently using a personal Youtube series called Swirlygate to enhance and show off talents.  There's a community at LJ for it here
• I got to hammer on a big issue for me - the sad truth that one may need to move in order to have the career one wants, and the hard decisions that can involve.  That's a personal issue, having had to confront it a few years ago.  Interestingly a good deal of people felt they were in the best place for their careers.
• Several times we touched on the fact that what one fans over and ones career can intersect, but it may not be obvious - someone who likes anime doesn't have to become an animator or a voice actor, they could be anything from a marketer to a media historian to working in video distribution.
• The sad state of job guides and books came up - that there's little that seems to be truly for fans.  Fortunately most people had heard of "What Color is your Parachute", which was nice because the last time I did the panel the majority of the audience had not.

Overall, a pretty good panel.  It's the second time I've done a panel on Fan To Pro, and the first with co-speakers, and it went pretty good.  A few things for next time I do this (or anyone who wants to do a panel like this):

• Have diverse people on the panel.  This worked pretty good here and was really interesting.
• I think the panel would have worked even better with some handouts for resources, etc.
• Coming up with a schedule is difficult on a subject like this unless one just wants to talk to the audience and not take questions (which was not our goal).  A general schedule worked pretty well.
• Individual success stories seem very effective for communicating successful career strategies - but don't discount stories of mistakes as useful.

I'll definitely be doing this next year at Anime North.  If anyone from the panel is dropping by, let us know if there's any ideas they have.

- Steven Savage