Josephine Hoy and Angela Aro relax after a hectic day at VCON 36

It’s been a whirlwind here for the two weeks as we prepped for Paul Best and Angela Aro from ‘Border Guardians of Ackernon‘ arriving from California, VCON, Geek Girl Con and a whistle-stop trip over to Victoria to guest on Indie Intertube. Along the way we interviewed many people for our upcoming webseries documentary and met a whole host of wonderful folk.

 Quick Roundup

Thursday Sept 29th Travelled down to Bellingham to collect Paul Best and Angela Aro from ‘Border Guardians of Ackernon’ from the Amtrak station. We met Paul at VCON 35 in 2010 and had kept in touch. We are currently filming a webseries documentary with Paul’s Wolf’s Head Productions. We then went straight to Richmond, Vancouver to prep for VCON 36.

Friday Sept 30th After catching up with old and new friends we got our table all set up for VCON. Last year we didn’t really know any other local webseries productions but we had connected to so many since then that we decided to use our table as an ‘Independent Westcoast Webseries’ table so we could promote other webseries along with ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’. We had a screening in the evening which was followed by ‘Standard Action’, which was great fun. Then we interviewed the cast and crew of ‘Standard Action’ for the webseries documentary.

Saturday Oct 1st We spent the day filming interviews and promoting webseries at the table. We also had a ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’ screening and panel with guest stars Josephine Hoy and Alan Douglas and executive producer, Louis Srygley. Angela was cosplaying Petrina from ‘Border Guardians of Ackernon’ and was asked to enter the Masquerade. We all went for a meal that night and had a rare old time – and Angela even won 1st prize in the Masquerade!

Sunday Oct 2nd We did more interviews, starting early with a very illuminating talk with Robert Luis Rabello, a Vancouver-based author who has some very interesting things to say about the digital landscape. We also interviewed/were interviewed by Warren Freyburg, who also posted this video of the ‘Webseries’ panel we did:

The panel, from left to right, was:

Vanessa Driveness (Associate Producer/Costume Designer/Marketing & PR Manger, Standard Action)
Joanna Gaskell (Writer/Creator/Actor, Standard Action)
Mary Higgins (Writer/Creator/Actor, Mind My Brains, Darling! & Marketing, Border Guardians of Ackernon)
Josephine Hoy (Producer, Glitch)
Ralph Fontaine (Assistant Director/Producer, Causality)
Anna Julia (Assistant Director/Producer, Causality)
Paul Best (Writer/Director, Border Guardians of Ackernon)
Angela Aro (Actor, Border Guardians of Ackernon)

Here are the webseries promos that we screened during the panel (thanks to Paul H for getting this done on time!)

Monday Oct 3rd After a packed weekend we caught up on some domestic tasks and prepared for Ed’s birthday.

Tuesday Oct 4th Introduced Paul and Angela to some delicious Indian food in Abbotsford and then went to iHop for birthday tea. Prepped for epic journey ahead…

Wednesday Oct 5th Collected Laura Olsen, amazing musician and composer from Blue Steer Studios, at YVR and then headed off to Tsawwassen to interview the cast and crew of ‘4 Villains’ webseries, and to appear live on the Indie Intertube podcast.

The 4 Villains collective were very welcoming and we had an interesting interview with them in their amazing lair. This new, interactive webseries is certainly worth checking out – you could even be in it!

A quick dash over to Indie Intertube and we got there just as the show started. April (Destini) and Amanda (Shadhavar) were so welcoming to us as their first in-studio guests, and we spent a very enjoyable 2 hours in their company. You can hear the show here:

We said some hasty goodbyes, hoping to get back to the ferry in time for the 7:00 PM sailing. Luckily for us….

In Part 2 we’ll reveal all about the build up to Geek Girl Con – stayed tuned!