BreakPoint 2006, Organizer Diary

Not a party review as such, there are plenty of those around on the net that will tell you which feature rocked and which competition sucked and so on, so here’s just my 2 cents on this years BreakPoint and the joy of organizing it.

Organizing BreakPoint actually starts many many months before the easter weekend. Usually the organizing team takes a couple months off after the previous version but starts to wake up again in the September/October timeframe thinking about a theme, getting new crew in and securing all the stuff with the local city and its authorities. Note that most of that is part of Scamp’s huge task, so tons of kudo’s and recognition for that.

I myself started when the Rumble In The Jungle theme was conceived and BitBreaker joined the C64 organizing team, with me leading it, after Fzool quit the team after the 2005 edition. The intro idea was conceived over a couple days emailing with the graphics being drawn by DCMP and JSL a week later. At the end the invitro was released and comments on it were good, so I was happy.. After that it was hoping that it would bring some extra visitors to BreakPoint and, most importantly, get people to release some productions there.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to the last days before the party. Most organizers arrive on the Wednesday before the party, with some even as early as Monday. I myself started the drive to Bingen on Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday : Upon arrival most of the hall is quiet, people sitting around with the deco team preparing their stuff. The beamteam is setting up its den in the top of the grandstand. I help putting up some Intel banners around the hall later with XXX and attach some of the blue sheet that shields the outside area from the parking lot. Other then that its setting up the C64 in the recording area, meeting the people and testing the C64 compo setup.

Thursday : Thursday is table day… Every organizer hates the moment when that big fucking Boels truck backs up on the parking lot. You just know its loaded with all the tables and chairs that need to go into the hall and that there is just no end to it. And indeed around noon the truck is there with its party load. As the big tent was blocking the closest emergency exit, used as entrance for all the tables, everything had to go around the back to use the furthest emergency exit to bring all the things into the hall. 3 hours of dragging tables and chairs around and the hall is set for the most part, with the first visitors arriving around 22:00 with the Hahn Airport shuttle everything had to be finished by that time anyway. The evening is spent with setting up a test competition to iron out the quirks in the recording and party system but no real errors were found so I was quite confident that everything would go smooth.

Friday : Welcome visitors ! The annual “get thrown out” competition was here again so everybody out and give us your money. During the next 3/4 hours people drizzle back into the hall. We (the organizers) try to get people to sit as close to each other as possible as we do need the space. Taking a whole table intended for 3 people on your own with big pc case, speakers, stereo and 21” screen is not really a good idea if you want people to look at you in a happy way. For competitions not much happened so not much to tell about that. My infodesk slot came up at midnight and ended at six. Not so much was going on once it was 3am so I had some time to walk around and say “hi” to the other Belgians that arrived. I ended my infodesk slot in the organizer area as everyone there was going to bed. Not much went on there, just a retard that decided to play loud drum and bass music at 5:30 in the morning. I kind of made him turn the volume down with quite good comments from his neighbours as a result. Must be my day.

Saturday : Woke up at a bit before 1400 so that there would be enough recording time before the 16:00 4K intro competition. The entire day would be filled with C64 competitions anyway so better make the best out of it. Yet, as I walk in to the recording area the place is a chaos with the recording equipment completely torn down for BitBreakers C64 seminar. VERY uncool. Recordingteam people however rebuild the entire thing in record time and the 3 entries are recorded pretty fast, well in time for the deadline. I watch the 4K competitions in the hall. Sadly the Amiga 4K was cancelled due to a single entry, that’s pretty sad but it will compete in the 64K competition so maybe that’s a tad positive, we’ll see later about that. Now on to the C64 democompo. Last year had only 3 entries of moderate quality so I really would like to do better then that, but then as an organizer you have very few influence over which entries you will receive. You can only nag with some democoders and hope that they will produce the best demo ever. It must be my lucky day however because at the moment we want to start recording two guys from Singular show up in the recording room with a disk. We check it out and ‘WHOW’ this is a fucking cool demo.. MORE PLEASE ! Its quickly recorded and we move on to the next entries. We decide to record the big demos first, those from The Dreams and Resource and Chorus to be exact. I Already got a preview from the TRSI demo earlier that day and asked Streetuff to make some changes in order to have it go passed our “no copyright material rule”, the changes were implemented and the demo was accepted and recorded.

Maybe I should say something about the Civitas demo, as some noise has been made about the demo not being shown in full during the competition here now. I’m a former member of Civitas and have had good relations with Zeitgeist and G-Fellow, and actually any other Civitas member I’ve ever met. But the demo… We (that is myself and BitBreaker) checked every entry multiple times and the Civitas demo was just so slow it was very hard to look at till the end. We counted the effects and decided that it would be very hard to show the demo for the full 10 minutes that it would run. It was a decision made by the C64 compo organizers and until this day both stand by it. I apologize if we hurt someone with this, mostly Civitas of course, but try to see it from the compo organizing point of view that we have to entertain 1200 people in a hall. Try to pace your demo’s a bit better perhaps ? It will give you more votes in the end as well !

Lets go on with the rest of the day shall we ? At the end we checked all recordings before we handed them over to the beamteam for displaying. The Chorus demo however showed a blue line at the left hand side of the screen for the entire demo, so this sure was a recording error. Quickly readjusting the screen geometry on the scanconvertor solved this and the demo was rerecorded with about 15 minutes to spare.

In to the main hall for the competitions we go ! C64 democompo time ! As you know organizers give their own hints of wich demos should win, the best ones are usually found at the end of competition with some “filling” in the beginning of the competition. I’ll describe some of the demos and the why’s later on in another posting if I ever feel like it. Now if the beamteam has learned one thing it is that is NOT a good idea to stream video files over the network. The hiccups in the demo playback were very very bad and for me almost killed the entire competition, now rest assured that this has already been taken care of for a next issue of BreakPoint. With all of this I had no time to do my infodesk things at 20:00 so maybe I’ll have to re-evaluate if I’m any good to the infodesk team. Don’t know yet.

Sunday : Arrived at the partyplace around noon to record the OldSkool Music competition’s C64 entries. Some nice ones are here and recording goes pretty smooth. I’m so dead however that BitBreaker agrees to record the C64 GFX entries on his own. Its only 3 entries, a number that sadly enough stays low year after year, so he’ll manage. I go back to the hotel and sleep some extra hours, in the meantime the 96K game is recorded as well so that kind of wraps it up for the C64 organizing team this BreakPoint. This leaves time for the Belgians to have their yearly meeting at the local Chinese restaurant in the town centre of Bingen where 10 of the 11 present Belgians have some lunch and relax from the party. I hit the sack pretty early again, missing the PC democompo as I’ve got infodesk duty again in the morning.

Monday : Infodesk… A slow beginning of the shift that TOTALLY turned around when the prizegiving competition ended with people buying their last bottles of water for the trip home and the other half of the party visitors cashing in their empty bottles for the 50cent return value on it. A hectic hour to finish it all of with, in the meantime, the people from Brisbois (where the thing was rented) already tearing down the tent as the party was officially over. Infodesk closed at 14:00 with the last people thrown out around 15:00. The big cleanup would begin.

I volunteered to remove the material used to darken the room from the windows behind the beamteam. Tear down the fabric, remove the iron threads, stuff all of the shit back into its boxes for storage. Tearing down is easy, so is the removing of the iron threads but getting the things back into their boxes.. boy oh boy. And not to forget that after all those days of party you are so tired you could sleep 2 days straight so then any activity is extremely tiring. Yet a couple of hours later everything is stuffed away and in the van towards the storage hall. A bit later I go home myself, finding my bed around midnight.

As said, for a review about the demos check back later.. That’s still in the process of being written.

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Breakpoint

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