Everfree Northwest Con Report · 5:24am May 22nd, 2018
Howdy folks! Well, I had a fun weekend. I ended up driving Thursday afternoon (managing to get to Portland at 3pm, just in time for the traffic to go to hell) and drove back Sunday evening (managing to hit a section of I-5 where they closed all but one lane at 10 PM, creating a huge traffic jam in the middle of nowhere), and had a total blast the whole time in-between.
One neat feature of the con was the ability to set up a schedule of your own on the Everfree Northwest website, which I ended up adding stuff onto so that people can see just how busy things were. Behold! The Schedule!
Thursday evening I met up with Xepher, who I roomed with, and a group of about 14 of us (con staff plus a few guests, including myself) went out to Sharp’s Roadhouse. Sharp’s is on the pricier side for local food options, but was actually quite good – delicious, delicious barbeque. I actually got the cheapest thing on the menu – a $14 pulled pork sandwich – because it sounded delicious. Spoiler alert: it was.
Eating dinner with folks was a ton of fun, and we all had a lot of fun chatting with each other and getting to know each other. I hadn’t really hung out with some of the folks there previously, while others were familiar faces, so it was cool getting to know folks. Afterwards, we pretty much kept hanging out with each other all evening, while I grabbed a few MLP episodes onto my laptop and, after everyone went to bed, watched An Uncommon Bond, which I hadn’t seen before.
Friday was the start of the con proper, and I gave shoutouts to a bunch of people I met/hung out with. I actually left off Tsitra360, who I actually ended up chatting with for a fair bit, as well as NadenerbD and Silfoe.
What can I say? I’m shipping trash. I had to ask Silfoe about their Rarity x Celestia shipping (Celerity or Sundress?) :V), and of course applaud NadenerbD’s shipping art as well.
But I didn’t actually end up talking all that much about my panels!
Quills and Sofas with Josh Haber and GM Berrow
I actually went to five panels on Friday – I attended the VIP panel with Josh Haber and GM Berrow in the morning in the writing room. I had found out the evening before (while Xepher was preparing for the panel) that Josh Haber is actually the story editor for MLP now – he has basically taken over the job that MA Larson and Megan McCarthy previously had. Apparently he’s the one who ends up wrangling the various writers and pressing them to turn in their work, so clearly, everything is his fault :V
Meanwhile, apparently we, the fans, are why GM Berrow has written episodes. She originally was just some schmuck writer who was writing the early reader MLP books (she’s written 21 of them at this point!) and ended up meeting Megan McCarthy at a con of all places, where she apparently clicked with her and managed to get invited to write an episode. She also, apparently, somehow doesn’t actually have an agent – she’s sort of snuck in through the whole process without one. Haber made a joke wondering what he is paying HIS agent for.
One of the major themes of the panel ended up being just how many people are actually involved in this stuff. Sure, there’s a writer and the story editor (who is the same in the stories he writes, obviously), but there’s at least two Hasbro executives, as well as the director of the episode, producers, some people from DHX – it sounds pretty intense. Moreover, because you have to make it work with the voice actors and the storyboarding and the animators and all that, there are changes made throughout the process, so even though you are “the writer”, there’s a lot of people involved, and no episode is any one person’s baby.
For those of you actually interested in the process, the scripts basically go through three major phases:
1)Script – a 1 page long pitch of what the episode is about
2)Outline – basically, saying what happens in every scene. This is, apparently, the hardest part of the process, as this is where you figure out exactly what is going to happen.
3)Script Draft – This is the actual script.
After each of these steps, there are notes, and a bunch of people will sign off on it at each stage of the process. The finished scripts are about 27 pages long, which roughly corresponds with a 21 minute long episode, though just how long they end up depends on the particulars of the episode.
Apparently it takes about 7-10 days to write a script, though Haber has done it in less than that at times, and apparently it’s a bunch of “fun” to go wrangle down all of the individual writers to make sure they get their scripts in on time (which doesn’t always happen).
There seems to be some friction between the writers and corporate over complexity, and apparently overly complicated things get pushed back on a lot.
And then he put 17 characters into one scene in Shadow Play, thus making the rest of the staff cry.
I do think that they are relying a bit too much on adding new characters, though. I was just thinking about how many they’ve added, and it is getting a little out of control. I don’t even remember the names of all but two of the pillars, and only Starswirl got any real characterization…
Also, is it just me, or are there a LOT of magical horses at this point? We’ve got Twilight, Starlight, Sunset, Sunburst, Trixie, and Starswirl, all of whom are variations on “Unicorn whose special talent is magic”, and all but one of whom have major insecurities about not being good enough (though Twilight is more nervous about letting others down, Trixie is vain, Starlight is worried about not being good enough, Sunburst just sucks at actually *casting* magic, and Sunset is worried about her past…).
I digress, but only sort of, as Haber mentioned adding new characters to try and add new angles to things, which is something that makes me kind of nervous – it is very hard to characterize a new character in 22 minutes, and it takes a lot of screen time.
Incidentally: before the con, I poked people about various questions, and one of them actually came up in this panel. Apparently, about 60% of the visual jokes and suchlike comes from the animation staff and storyboard artists, rather than the writers, including virtually all of the background jokes or references, so there is a major creative contribution from people other than the writers on that material.
Before I finish talking about the panel, one last thing of note about it – Josh Haber mentioned something he does while checking scripts. Apparently, he will sometimes cover up names and simply read the dialogue, and try to identify who is speaking. If he can’t do that, that’s a bad sign. It is a technique I have seen used a few times elsewhere, and while I know some of you have heard of it before, it is a neat little trick, especially if you’re struggling to make characters sound like themselves instead of you.
My notes on the panel concluded with a quote:
”Writers are actors with homework”
All Aboard the Feels Train
This was a fanfic writer panel, though sadly, I didn’t write down who all was on it – I remember Monochromatic and Somber being up there, along with myself, but I don’t remember who all else was. This was a panel about feels, and was a bit scattered; a lot of good things were said, but it didn’t feel like we were necessarily the most organized here, which was something of a problem with most of the fan panels throughout the con. As I was actually on this panel, I didn’t actually take a whole lot of notes, instead working to try and contribute and pay attention to what other people were saying so I didn’t lose the thread of what we were doing. I did bring up several stories that did a good job of delivering emotional impact, but I feel like a lot of the panel ended up focusing way too much on negative emotions, while some of the audience members were, I think, looking for, you know, how to make people happy, too, not just cutting onions up whenever you’re writing.
I did think that we had a very skilled set of writers up there, though; everyone up their knew their stuff. But the panel didn’t ultimately end up gelling that well, even though everyone was tossing out smart stuff and running off of each other, I think we ended up losing a lot of the audience.
Shipping Panel
This one included Oroboro, Albinocorn, Novel Idea, Monochromatic, and myself (and maybe someone else? I think there might have been six up there) – and I’m not sure why, but this panel ended up feeling like it went a lot better than the last one did. Maybe because some of us had been up for the previous panel, or maybe just we all clicked onto the same wavelength, I felt like this actually ended up with some really solid back and forthing and building up off of each other.
Unfortunately, again, I was on the panel, and thus, didn’t take many notes, as I was busy trying to keep track of what we were talking about. Everyone on the panel was very sharp, and we did a lot of agreeing with each other and building off of each others’ points, and it was lovely, but I don’t really remember any of it. I do hope that the audience enjoyed it.
Sussing Out a Synopsis
This panel felt kind of disorganized and I’m not sure it was actually a great subject for a full hour of conversation. It was supposed to be about how to get people to read your stories and how to write a synopsis for your story, but really, I think this is something better done in a textual medium (doubly so because cover art is a huge thing). We sort of ran out of stuff to talk about and sort of circled around after a while.
However, I think this panel took a sharp turn for the better when we just started workshopping people’s synopses in front of the whole class, asking people from the audience for story synopses and then helping them out with writing them. That worked pretty well, and I think actually did a better job of helping to illustrate what to do, and maybe some people got some pretty killer synopses out of it.
Though, seriously: cover art. YOU NEED GOOD COVER ART. Ask artists if you can use their art, or make something of your own!
And good titles can really help to sell your story as well. Those “Twilight Sparkle does X” titles are super lazy, but they tell the audience why they should click on and read your story. There are better ways to write titles, but whatever you use, try to make it grabbing and, hopefully, topical.
Critical Threat Roll
I don’t remember who all was on this panel – I remember Somber was, but I don’t remember who else. Sadly, this one sort of felt a bit meh as well, and I’m not sure how valuable it actually was to the audience – it could probably mostly be summarized as:
1)Suck it up, you pansy. Most people don’t even get feedback, so even getting negative feedback is more than those 0 comment stories get.
2)Ask people for help. Don’t be afraid of asking people for help or editing advice or whatever.
3)Respect your editors.
4)If you are editing for someone, try to read over the whole story and figure out what it is about. The most important thing is to make sure that the story as a whole supports whatever theme or story arc it has, so making sure all of the bits fit together is important.
The rest of Friday evening was spent hanging out. It was really fun hanging out with people, both in the writer’s hangout and afterwards. Despite Xepher being all “We can go back to the room for drinks,” instead myself and a cluster of other people hung out in the hallway together. It was actually really cool, but I actually totally forgot the name of one of the people I was hanging out with THE ENTIRE TIME WE WERE HANGING OUT, resulting in me doing that thing where you don’t actually mention someone’s name while talking with them, while hoping someone else brings it up so you can remember it, but then they don’t, and then you’ve been talking for two hours…
But yeah, it was cool hanging out. A bunch of people filtered in and out at various points, but I think I did a bunch of shoutouts to most of them in my last post.
After eating breakfast at Denny’s (which wasn’t very good – though I did get a free milkshake), I ended up sort of floating around for a good chunk of the afternoon, drifting in-between the vendor hall and just the hall-halls while talking to various folks about random things. Honestly, I don’t really remember much of that afternoon – it all ended up being something of a blur.
Creating Characters with Josh Haber, GM Berrow, Jim Miller, and Katrina Hadley
This was an interesting panel with the VIPs about characterization, but it also went into a bunch of other stuff as well. I had never seen Katrina Hadley before and had no idea who she was prior to the con – she did storyboards for some of the Equestria Girls and Season 5 stuff (including the opening and closing episodes), and now is the director for all the Equestria Girls shorts. She was really animated and was very funny, and her many gestures added a bunch to what she was saying.
It’s no wonder the storyboard artists make her dance for them so they can get poses right.
Jim is also really cool, and it is interesting seeing the distinction between writing and directing. Having to keep track of everything and everyone seems pretty crazy.
Apparently, the toys requests (with the lone exception of the PRINCESS BABY) are actually about sets, clothing, accessories, vehicles, and other things. They actually have a very free hand with the characters on the show in general, and apparently there’s something of a multi-stage process involved in making new characters, as they go from the writer, to the artists to go and get made into a character whose appearance reflects their personality, to getting a proper voice for them. Plus, of course, celebrity voice acting at times.
It is interesting to see how they think about characters, because as a writer, we’re doing all the work ourselves, while they have a whole team (plus their lawyer, who makes sure that they aren’t using someone else’s trademarked character name) working on stuff, but it also means that the characters aren’t necessarily one person’s creation.
One interesting thing was that there isn’t an updated God Book – instead, stuff about the characters is almost entirely transmitted via tribal knowledge. Like, they know what basis the characters have, but they don’t update it to keep things together like LucasArts or whatever. This… explains a lot, honestly.
It also amused me how often they noted that scripts put the rest of the staff into awkward places, like having a character carry something while talking (which is a problem, as they carry things with their mouths), resulting in the storyboard people having to get creative to make things work. The lack of hands is often overlooked at random times, resulting in awkwardness, and they don’t always catch everything before it goes over to the storyboard people and directors and such.
Amusingly, it also came up that Zephyr Breeze is based on an actual person. Ouch.
Apparently also a lot of episode titles only end up getting finalized pretty late in the process, and a lot of early titles get discarded. Amusingly, The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows was one of those placeholder titles – which ended up as the episode title when Berrow had been expecting it to be changed.
But hey, at least we remember what that episode was about!
I got the chance to speak to Katrina Hadley for a bit after the panel ended, and she is a very awesome person. I also managed to cheat and ask her if she had any questions she would like for me to ask her for the panel the next day, because clearly she knows her stuff and thus knows what the audience would like to learn about.
It’s not cheating, really!
Vexed By Villains
Of all the panels this weekend, this was the one that I felt suffered the most from lack of preparation. We didn’t really have any sort of clear plan, and I think it showed, and the panel suffered for it. We all kept trying to help, but without any sort of cohesive plan or structure, it just kind of went all over the place.
If people are actually interested in this subject matter, I might write a blog post about it. Oddly, I almost never use villains in MLP fics, though I suppose few of my stories actually involve such things anyway.
I should probably actually write something along those lines at some point for MLP, actually.
Hmm…
After that point, I hung out with some folks for a while (Georg, Mudpony, Olden Brony briefly I believe, and… someone else, gah!), and then we all went to the Hawaiian barbeque, and I have to say, I really enjoyed the kaluha pork there. They had very reasonable portion sizes, and reasonable prices as well (was like $8 for a real dinner). I then suggested we all go over to the Sketches from a Hat panel, where a bunch of artists (all awesome people!) all drew… well, sketches from a hat. Ironically, while all three people I went with got their sketches drawn, I didn’t. Oh, well.
Afterwards, I hung out with some of the artist folks for a bit, then headed over to the writer’s room for the evening hangout. I was supposed to judge Iron Author entries, and got through some… and then noticed ImDrunkOnTea dropping by. The room was super loud, and he has pretty sensitive hearing, so I went out into the hall to chat with him for a bit.
I hadn’t realized, but it turns out he did all the graphic design stuff for the con this year, which I thought all looked super great. He’s a really cool guy, and it was great talking to him about stuff.
After talking with him for a while, I came back in and finally got around to doing Iron Author judging… and then it turns out that, thanks to Ebon Quill, we were almost done, and we managed to get through all the entries. After that, we had some free time to hang out, and a ton of us went back with Xepher and I to our room, where we all hung out into the wee hours of the morning, talking about random stuff, having Ruirik try and force me to drink (peer pressure! Fortunately, DARE came to the rescue. I think someone got a photo), and finalizing our decision about the finalist stories and creating a top three. There were like, six stories which were all within a point of each other, and I ended up reading them all. Afterwards, we got to find out who all had written the stories, though I’d guessed on a few, but I think one of my favorites was by Kalan, a guy I had never heard of (and I hope to see it posted here on FIMFiction in some form). But Tumbleweed, RedSquirrel456, Ruirik (who left the room to go to sleep before we did the final judging), Hap (whose The Basement really moved Silver Flare – I look forward to seeing that get edited and completed), and DrakeyC also all ended up in there close together.
Delta Sierra (another person I ultimately didn’t know) won with their story Firefly, while second place was a tie between Hap’s The Basement and DrakeyC’s ... All of the stories can be found here, and I hope that folks edit their stuff up and post it on FIMFiction, as there were a number of interesting stories in there (including Monochromatic’s Social Climbing, which I think could be something really cool).
Then, after everyone left so Xepher and I could go to sleep… we ended up talking until like, 5 am anyway. Whoops.
I ended up spending all morning eating (at Subway, which I ultimately decided was the best of the three local fast food restaurants) and prepping questions for my VIP panel.
From Script to Screen Josh Haber, GM Berrow, Jim Miller, and Katrina Hadley
Xepher was kind enough to offer to wrangle people for the Q&A for this panel, so I was pretty much free just to concentrate on my questions and interacting with the panel.
And they were totally awesome! This was my favorite panel of the whole con. Yeah, I’m biased, but I had an absolute blast being up there on stage. I had a set of notes prepared, I had made sure to have at least a couple questions for each person, I managed to have just the right number of questions that we had 20 minutes left at the end for questions…
It was really fun.
I actually got to chat for a bit with Jim Miller and Katrina Hadley before it started, as they got there early (directors have to be punctual! Keep to that timetable!), so we had a bit to discuss where we were going to go with the panel, and it actually ended up really, really great.
After the introductions, Jim started us off with a walk through of the whole episode creation process. He joked about people needing pillows before he started, and we all thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.
My goodness, it is a long, involved process, with many, many, many stages, all of which are going on at once for different episodes at different points in their production cycle. There was a point when he was finishing up season 7, in the middle of season 8, and starting season 9. And Katrina Hadley had it even worse; because she does shorts, she at one point had 50(!) episodes she was working on at the same time for the Equestria Girls property.
And yet, they somehow get it done.
Katrina talked for a bit about how things are different for her, because she has done everything from 2 minute shorts to 5 minute things to Choose Your Own Ending to 50 minute long things which are actually 5 10-minute episodes stuck together, to doing episodes, to dong two-parter episodes, to doing the Equestria Girls movie. Working short is apparently hard, though working long (like on the two-parter stuff) apparently leads to (ironically) more cut content than the 22 minute ones, because they try to cram so much in there and it just doesn’t fit.
Josh talked about what he does as the story editor, and the stuff he is looking for at each stage of the process from his end, as well as telling us about calling up writers at 3 am on the day their scripts are due to get them from them.
And sometimes the day after.
And the day after that.
Yikes.
Apparently the jokes about the timetables from the directors came from somewhere!
Then the panelists actually asked GM Berrow the question I was going to ask her next, which was neat, as I got to be lazy and just stand there and smile while they chatted. Really, it was great.
The whole panel involved a lot of discussion amongst the panelists, and they did a really great job of going through what their job is like, sharing fun little anecdotes about things.
And best of all, you all can watch it! That’s right, it was actually recorded, like all the Mane Stage events, by the EFNW staff.
Unfortunately, the video is still in editing, but I’ll be sure to post it here when it goes up, and seeing as I was on stage, I was unable to take actual notes.
Still, I was very happy with how it went, and ImDrunkOnTea told me afterwards that people were tweeting from the audience about it, so I guess folks had fun.
After that, I went around the con to say my goodbyes, as I knew a lot of folks would be leaving soon. I got to have a lovely chat with a whole bunch of people. White Diamonds is an absolute gem and is really fun to talk to, and Tumbleweed and I ended up there at the same time by coincidence, chatting about RariJack, so there may be more of that coming from the three of us.
She is also an absolutely amazing artist, and I finally managed to commission her this year; I’ll definitely scan it in and post it when that gets sent out to me.
There were a bunch of other really cool artists there as well – I got to watch Bobdude play with a Yo Yo, swung by Ruirik’s booth, had another chat with ImDrunkOnTea and Tsirsa360, went around smiling and complimenting a bunch of artists on being totally amazing (because seriously, they are), wrote down the websites of a few artists I’d never seen before who were really awesome, and just having a good time, before I headed back up to the writing room to talk to a few more people, and then down to closing ceremonies.
The day ended with a group of us going over to the Thai place and chatting for a while, and me eventually leaving at around 8 pm to drive home to Corvallis.
All in all, I had a fantastic time. It was really fun, and I look forward to next year. Apparently the con set a new record for attendance (2700+ people!), so it seems like it is thriving. I hope to see you all there again!
Now, to work on some writing and editing...
4866584
Sorry!
4866586
Heh, s'all good.
I was one of the ones at the Sussing Out a Synopsis panel, I really appreciate your input on my Synopsis along with Xephers' and the rest of the panel (I cant remember the other 2 peoples names their name tags on the table were blocked by peoples heads).
PS I was the guy in the quibble pants cosplay with the Pith Helmet
Everything is Josh Haber's fault. Kimi Sparkle was right to turn his name into a cry of anguish. :V
Was cool getting to meet ya if only for a few words. Always nice to put faces with names and stories.
Was a good time. Hoping to be there again next year as well.
4866584 TD's angsting that he cant remember the names of one of the four people he went to the BBQ joint with. I managed to remember one name (other than my own) and I'm pretty darned happy about it.
See what's waiting for you when you get older, TD?
You lied to me! IYou are neither draconic nor metallic!
4866700
Wait is there new Kimi Sparkle content out? (She’s the satirical reviewer done by shirclop pones right?)
4866864
Hell no, and yes. I don't think Jenny Nicholson's doing her anymore.
White Diamonds still arts!? I've missed them so.
4866747
Bah, I'm a dragon. If D&D has taught me anything, my stats only go up as I age!
4866983
They do! They haven't done a bunch of new stuff lately (mostly just intermittent commissions) but they are apparently trying to get back into the swing of things.
4866841
Bah! All metallic dragons have polymorph self as a racial ability.
4866706
Yeah, it was nice meeting you! Sorry we didn't get to talk much, but I think I've said that to a bunch of people.
I'm reading through this and thinking: when did you have time to take detailed notes?
4867543
Well, during the two VIP panels I attended but did not host, I had time to take notes. I took some notes on my phone while wandering around, but they were pretty inadequate. So a lot of it ultimately came from memory.
This was when I asked Josh Haber whether he had found his calling with writing, or still wanted to become an actor. He and G.M. Berrow both pointed out that, as a writer, you have to get into a character's headspace and act it out (causing those around you to think you've gone crazy as you make facial expressions and mumble to yourself as you type).