New Challenges

Remember that time that I posted about removing the stone of shame and attaching the stone of triumph? Yeah....that was awesome....so that's pretty much the situation right now. You get a major project done, then you get your next challenge almost right away. In this case, we got the program guide (now a whopping 32 pages!) and the artbook done and off to print.

Now comes the financial part of things. Unfortunately I don't have a huge reserve of cash, got some of it, but not enough to pull off the show without blinking. We've raised more this year through sponsorship, advertising, and exhibitors, then ever before, which is a really good thing. But the costs for going to a 2 day event are HUGE! As in rijunkulously massive...So, everything becomes a juggle. Especially since we get the majority of our funds from gate admission, but we have to pay for lots of stuff in advance. Add that into coordinating the rest of the show, and it's pretty tough.

On a side note, our other transit ads should be up. We went with a totally different direction for this campaign. More specifically Woodruff Sweitzer (an advertising agency that we're working with) came up with the concept. I think it's a great idea, I've passed it out to a couple of peers, and the response has been pretty positive. We're calling it our Geek Campaign!

That's it for now.

- Kandrix

Tougher Long Weekend!

Dear Case of Red Bull,

How have you been doing? You're looking really hot right now with your slim cans and big smile. I've been dreaming of kissing you all night long, and intimately spending this long weekend with you. We've been through a lot together lately, and I just want you to know that I appreciate everything you do for me. I might go crazy, get the shakes, or even gassy, but that's love. I'll see you again soon!

Love,
Kandrix

Toughest Week Ahead

This week will be the toughest week for me (by far) with regards to the show. There's lots of pressure everywhere. The program needs to go to print pretty much right away. It's ballooned up to 24 pages, plus a 4 page map insert. I've got 16 pages out of 28 complete right now. It's funny because at the beginning of last weekend, I was pretty much "flipping a coin" to decide what to work on first. I guess I'm lucky that I spent the time working on the guide....but of course I got that crazy deadline.

But I did get a source of inspiration today, one of the guys I haven't seen in a while dropped in with some posters and gave me that "little bit of pick me up" that I needed. There's only 40 some odd days until the big show. I just gotta remind myself that now's the time to stay focused, or a lot of the hard work we all put into getting this thing off the ground could suffer.

I also just got the artbook pieces by Jo Chen and Amy Hadley late last night/early this morning, both of which brought a big smile to my face!

Well...onto page 17!

- Kandrix

Moving Things Along

It's been a good couple of days. I've been able to get a bunch of things finished up for the Expo, and it's nice to have a bunch of things off your plate...unfortunately there's even more stuff to do! You ever see that episode of the Simpsons, where Homer's got the stone of shame, and he's so happy when it comes off...then they attach the stone of triumph? And it's a bigger stone?

That's pretty much how I feel.

I think I saw something about only 49 days left....and I don't even know when that was posted....so there's a shrinking window of time. This must sound repetitive with me talking about getting something done, and having another thing to do...

I met with our ad agency today, and they presented some concepts for our ad campaign. I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to expect, but I m pretty jazzed about what they showed me. We've only got a few weeks to make the ad deadlines, so the crunch is on (again!)

What was really interesting is that they were looking through our guest artists, and picked out one artist to make some of their concepts. That artist was Omar Dogan, which was really cool! We also talked about ideas on tying in our print concepts with our television promotions. Should be fun!

Well, that's it for now!

- Kandrix

Being Sick Sucks!

At this very moment, I'm sick. Or at least I'm pretty sure that I'm sick. Which really sucks. Had a quick meeting with a couple of the guys for the show. More of a workshop, we figured some stuff out for the volunteers, costume contest, floorplan, and a few other things I don't remember quite at this moment. Being sick just makes it hard to focus on stuff that needs to get done.

Our second batch of postcards and tickets are coming out later than I want. Part of it was waiting until we finished signing Tricia Helfer to our show. The other part was time (or lack thereof). They should be in this coming week, so then we can really push the marketing of the show here in Calgary.

We're also starting to work out some stuff with Citytv for our television ads (which will be sweet!). The Pattison platform transit ads I mentioned previously are up now too, at the U of C, ACAD/SAIT, and Chinook stations.

There's another batch of guests that I still have to put up on the site, and it'll be the last major guest update. We're completely full everywhere right now, guests, exhibitors, artists. I hope that our advance ticket sales do well!

Some bad news, we've had a few cancellations to our lineup. Amy Allen is in New York, and the film that she's working on had their schedule pushed down. It's unfortunate, but she'll be replaced by Matthew Wood, who played General Grievous from Star Wars. We've got a lot of male media guests, as Tricia's the only girl! And she's only there for Saturday!

Other cancelations include Bryan Lee O'Malley and Hope Larson. Some stuff cropped up last minute (and I already picked up their flights), but now I'm sending them over to the Emerald City Comicon, and they'll be coming out next year. So in the end, everything's cool.

That's all I can think of for now (things are a bit foggy...)

- Kandrix

Packed Work Weekend!

I guess that streak of posting everyday ended...gotta start another one! This will be one of the first weekends I've actually got that's completely free to work on all sorts of Expo stuff. I've made my task list, and hopefully I can stayed focused on getting everything done. It's really tough sometimes because it's easy to get side tracked. I call it the 'can of worms syndrome', where something pops up and you thing it's just a quick and easy task, but turns out to require much more work than you planned.

I've got to book more flights for our guests, do a web update (got some new surprise guests that I'm excited to tell everyone about!), finish some web promos, work on the programming and costume contest/masquerade....and a whole bunch of other things. It should be very productive!

What's also really cool is I've been getting a bunch of our guest's artbook pieces. I love seeing how a project comes together!

If I've got time, I'm also going to start laying out the program guide, I've got less than three weeks before that goes to print!

I also noticed how much text I've got, so here's the rough promo image of Marvel's Phoenix drawn by Gene Ha!

- Kandrix