So, by way of an apology to all of you who tuned in to last night’s webcast, let me explain a little of what happened, however, please believe whatever you read here will never convey the trauma and frustration we experienced first hand……..
OK, we’d actually done 3 live webcasts up to last night, and each time we’re getting better.
You start off, just pleased that you’ve managed to get a whole show out live.
Then, you start getting a little bit clever.
Then, you start planning Hollywood style special FX and state of the art technological links, that would put NASA to shame.
But the reeeeeeally frustrating bit….
The reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally frustrating bit is…..
that we’d done it.
We weren’t overreaching ourselves.
We had worked out exactly what we could do, and how to do it.
Tom had spent all day tweaking and refining the thing, and it was working beautifully.
I mean beauuuuuuutifully!
We had a virtual TV stage.
We had a video wall.
We had super slinky titles and graphics.
We had a really good webcast.
With an hour to go, we were quietly excited and optimistic.
And then,
With 2 minutes to go…..
Let me say that again.
WITH 2 MINUTES TO GO!!!!!!
Someone stood on the mains power cable, that powered all the computers, sound cards, monitors, in fact everything that we needed, everything we had worked on, ALL Toms effort’s gone.
To make matters worse, it was a simple mistake by our special guest.
Our lovely, knowledgable, special guest presenter stood on our lead.
Don’t get us wrong.
This wasn’t even his fault!! HE was helping us by passing over a phone we thought hadn’t been switched off.
And we aren’t holding him to blame.
It was our fault that we hadn’t got a back up in place.
It was our fault we hadn’t Gaffered the mains leads to the floor.
It was our fault that we didn’t have a UPS unit.
And Chris felt terrible. Which we didn’t want him to.
BUT, after all that.
We never gave up.
Winston Churchill would’ve been proud.
“Never ever ever give up!” He said.
And we didn’t.
We persevered.
Tom had 15 minutes to try and fix what had taken all day to set up.
We had audio glitches. We had Periods of silence.
The PC was so spangled by the abrupt cut-off of life giving 240v, that it collapsed under the weight of our request for it to remember all the configurations of the day, and decided it would revert to being not much more complicated than a toaster, and refused to play ball at any level.
In the end we put out a webcast that was in two halves.
The first was an abortive attempt to push all the previous efforts together and force the thing to work.
It didn’t.
So we gave Tom a further 10 minutes to re-boot, start from scratch, and just get something to work.
And so, set against the only picture background we had ( a Chinese village, from which ironically, some of the parts for the equipment were probably manufactured…) Chris managed to give a 40 minute demonstration of Bass Station 2.
So the moral of the Story:
Back everything up, all the time! And Gaffa Tape your power leads to the floor……
Meanwhile,
We will be back.
Next week in fact.
And we’re booked throughout June and July, so watch this space for further details….
And above all…
Keep smiling 