Shore Leave
Jul. 9th, 2023 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealSo while browsing conventions, I serendipitously discovered that there was a convention outside of Baltimore, and their guests of honor this year were none other than Ben Browder and Claudia Black! (Who played John and Aeryn, respectively, in Farscape.) Given that I'd only just gotten around to watching Farscape after twenty years, and there they were, it seemed like fate.
Friday night: made it out to the hotel, got my badge, went to the game room, won at Ticket to Ride. :D Did some browsing around the book stores/table vendors.
Saturday: Went to a couple panels, including one about worldbuilding government systems. They had a automated closed-captioning system with the usual limitations. As the panelists were introducing themselves, they were asked to speak about what genres they wrote in. One of the guests said "well, mostly I write science fiction and alternate history...but my filk verges on fantasy." The caption translated that as "my FILTH verges on fantasy." :D
There was a big auditorium for the special guests to talk/have a few Q&A from the crowd, so no crowding issues. Ben looks exactly the same as John, black shirt and all. Claudia: "It's not fair, he hasn't aged." She also looks very stunning (bright blond hair, pink outfit), just not like Aeryn at all.
They had a great dynamic, bantering back and forth. This is all paraphrase.
Claudia: "I apologize if I have forgotten things, COVID has affected my ability to remember nouns. I'm awed at all your passion/dedication/insight, but sometimes you guys have more encyclopedic memory than us! Also, we sometimes have to maintain a separation between what we create and what you see, there are scenes that get cut and we can't afford to get too attached to them."
Ben: "I wasn't really sure this was going to work, until maybe about episode 7 or so when we found our footing and got to do things our way."
"In Australia there wasn't much of a chain of command, so we'd have people on set giving us completely contradictory advice."
Q: When did you know Farscape was going to be such a success? Also, what was it like doing the "Farscape" episode of "Stargate"?
A: Not at first. They didn't believe in what we were doing in Australia, they scheduled the premiere episode at the same time as the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, so of course no one watched. And then in a precursor to binge watching, they dumped all the episodes out pretty quickly. So it took a while.
(Ben) I kept thinking, no, this'll never catch on, it'll never catch on, and it kept being renewed, long enough for me to meet my wife down in Australia. Then of course, when I thought we were safe, it was canceled.
(Claudia) The production quality in Farscape was so high, all the little things, that everyone could do their best work. So when I was filming the "Farscape" episode of "Stargate," I was able to tell them "hey, dye Chiana's wig black and leave it upside-down overnight so the colors can drip, that's why it looks so good." That was really cool, being able to pass on that knowledge.
Q: So, Claudia, you got your role in Stargate, and then Ben came along...did you, like, help him get his job?
A: No, I finally had my own thing, and then this one shows up! :P Having us both in the show but never appear together was such a waste, it's like...having a Ferrari and a race car driver, I'll let you decide who is who in this analogy, but never letting them drive it. The kind of dynamic I had with Ben is...literally God-given, whatever god you believe in, really a gift.
Ben: Yeah, the chemistry I had with Claudia is like nothing I've had before or probably since.
(Everyone who saw them on stage agrees, btw, maybe it was their first time getting back together for a while and they just seemed so happy to be there. D'awwwww.)
Q: Are there any funny stories from behind the scenes you haven't told us about?
A: Um...No comment. *giggles* Racing sand buggies out in the Sydney dunes...yeah...that was perilous.
Claudia: There's a lot more awareness now of psychological safety in the workplace, and I think that's important. We need parents in the room. I'm a survivor of "Me, Too," and I became a trauma counselor in part to help others deal with those kind of issues. The stuff that people got away with twenty years ago shouldn't happen now.
Q: What's it like working with puppets, and are you allowed to touch them?
Ben: Yes! That's great! It's part of what makes them "human," being able to physically interact with them. We just have to give warning, so the puppeteers don't freak out about us breaking their expensive babies.
Later, there was a panel (without those two) on "Farscape at 24," how has it aged. More fan discussion. "The amount of emotion they're able to get from the puppets is great." "Yeah, the attention to detail is great, Rygel's prosthetics are based on human-type prosthetic teeth and eyes." "Is Rygel Grogu's long-lost second cousin?" "I don't know, but Yoda borrows Rygel's throne-sled in 'Attack of the Clones'." "What makes it not just another fish-out-of-water story is that Aeryn is the least human, the most of a stranger in the found family. Even Rygel has very human motivations." "Some of the most powerful scenes are D'Argo's acting, I don't think we give Anthony Simcoe enough credit for that."
The way autographs worked was Ben and Claudia would sign one item free for each guest. (There were other guests who charged for autographs, and you could pay for photo ops, etc. Some "Battlestar Galactica" people.) Someone went around to different rooms to say "badge numbers 1-300 can get in line, now 1-500, now 1-1000, etc." I got disoriented and went in the wrong line first, you were supposed to go to one and then feed into the other, but it all worked out. I blabbered something to Claudia about "I just discovered the show and it's great, thank you so much for putting up with us" <3
Later that evening there was a small filk gathering, which was neat. One woman introduced her song with "I originally learned this in a lyrics-and-chords book called Rise Up Singing, then added some more verses later." and I was like "ohhhh yes, I know that well" (it's one of my mom's standbys, we learned many many many folk songs from this growing up.) The song was not one I knew, it was about a very special rooster who rejuvenates anything and everything he comes across.
Logistics: I did not do due diligence on the research, it was technically "in the Baltimore area" but much farther out than I'd expected. Between one rail system and the next you could get within a ~15-minute walk or so by public transit both Friday evening and Saturday morning, but a 15-minute walk in a business park on a sticky, humid, Maryland day is still not great. For someone who wasn't staying at the hotel, it was hard to know how to order food in the bar, and going out to get food was also a challenge. Then ridesharing back at night was significantly pricier late Saturday than early-ish Friday. (Not a burden for me, just surprising/hadn't counted on it.)
Also, this wasn't specific to me, but the air conditioning system just...did not work in many of the conference rooms. As I pointed out, it was at least a good representation of the Sebacean experience, but really.
I think if I went to this location again, I would splurge and get a hotel room. That being said, the stars really aligned with it being Ben and Claudia this year; this sort of event is more TV-oriented than is my preference (it was originally founded as a Star Trek convention/club), and there are other opportunities more focused on short fiction and media that are my scene, so I might not feel the urge.
Seeing the author guests promoing their books really drove home the "pyramid" aspects of the publishing industry. Like, all of these people are orders of magnitude more prolific/well-known/professional than I am, and there are orders of magnitude more people like me who are nobodies in comparison. But even these people, I've never heard of, and don't really feel like buying their books. Cautionary tale about calibrating what "success" looks like.
The in-person SFF cons I've been to have skewed towards an older demographic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, I am sure there are many aspects of events that would drive me up the wall if they were run by people my age and younger. It's great to be able to engage with filk in person, as someone who's written and read a lot of parodies that broadly fall under that genre but doesn't actually get to sing them with other people. IDK.
Friday night: made it out to the hotel, got my badge, went to the game room, won at Ticket to Ride. :D Did some browsing around the book stores/table vendors.
Saturday: Went to a couple panels, including one about worldbuilding government systems. They had a automated closed-captioning system with the usual limitations. As the panelists were introducing themselves, they were asked to speak about what genres they wrote in. One of the guests said "well, mostly I write science fiction and alternate history...but my filk verges on fantasy." The caption translated that as "my FILTH verges on fantasy." :D
There was a big auditorium for the special guests to talk/have a few Q&A from the crowd, so no crowding issues. Ben looks exactly the same as John, black shirt and all. Claudia: "It's not fair, he hasn't aged." She also looks very stunning (bright blond hair, pink outfit), just not like Aeryn at all.
They had a great dynamic, bantering back and forth. This is all paraphrase.
Claudia: "I apologize if I have forgotten things, COVID has affected my ability to remember nouns. I'm awed at all your passion/dedication/insight, but sometimes you guys have more encyclopedic memory than us! Also, we sometimes have to maintain a separation between what we create and what you see, there are scenes that get cut and we can't afford to get too attached to them."
Ben: "I wasn't really sure this was going to work, until maybe about episode 7 or so when we found our footing and got to do things our way."
"In Australia there wasn't much of a chain of command, so we'd have people on set giving us completely contradictory advice."
Q: When did you know Farscape was going to be such a success? Also, what was it like doing the "Farscape" episode of "Stargate"?
A: Not at first. They didn't believe in what we were doing in Australia, they scheduled the premiere episode at the same time as the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, so of course no one watched. And then in a precursor to binge watching, they dumped all the episodes out pretty quickly. So it took a while.
(Ben) I kept thinking, no, this'll never catch on, it'll never catch on, and it kept being renewed, long enough for me to meet my wife down in Australia. Then of course, when I thought we were safe, it was canceled.
(Claudia) The production quality in Farscape was so high, all the little things, that everyone could do their best work. So when I was filming the "Farscape" episode of "Stargate," I was able to tell them "hey, dye Chiana's wig black and leave it upside-down overnight so the colors can drip, that's why it looks so good." That was really cool, being able to pass on that knowledge.
Q: So, Claudia, you got your role in Stargate, and then Ben came along...did you, like, help him get his job?
A: No, I finally had my own thing, and then this one shows up! :P Having us both in the show but never appear together was such a waste, it's like...having a Ferrari and a race car driver, I'll let you decide who is who in this analogy, but never letting them drive it. The kind of dynamic I had with Ben is...literally God-given, whatever god you believe in, really a gift.
Ben: Yeah, the chemistry I had with Claudia is like nothing I've had before or probably since.
(Everyone who saw them on stage agrees, btw, maybe it was their first time getting back together for a while and they just seemed so happy to be there. D'awwwww.)
Q: Are there any funny stories from behind the scenes you haven't told us about?
A: Um...No comment. *giggles* Racing sand buggies out in the Sydney dunes...yeah...that was perilous.
Claudia: There's a lot more awareness now of psychological safety in the workplace, and I think that's important. We need parents in the room. I'm a survivor of "Me, Too," and I became a trauma counselor in part to help others deal with those kind of issues. The stuff that people got away with twenty years ago shouldn't happen now.
Q: What's it like working with puppets, and are you allowed to touch them?
Ben: Yes! That's great! It's part of what makes them "human," being able to physically interact with them. We just have to give warning, so the puppeteers don't freak out about us breaking their expensive babies.
Later, there was a panel (without those two) on "Farscape at 24," how has it aged. More fan discussion. "The amount of emotion they're able to get from the puppets is great." "Yeah, the attention to detail is great, Rygel's prosthetics are based on human-type prosthetic teeth and eyes." "Is Rygel Grogu's long-lost second cousin?" "I don't know, but Yoda borrows Rygel's throne-sled in 'Attack of the Clones'." "What makes it not just another fish-out-of-water story is that Aeryn is the least human, the most of a stranger in the found family. Even Rygel has very human motivations." "Some of the most powerful scenes are D'Argo's acting, I don't think we give Anthony Simcoe enough credit for that."
The way autographs worked was Ben and Claudia would sign one item free for each guest. (There were other guests who charged for autographs, and you could pay for photo ops, etc. Some "Battlestar Galactica" people.) Someone went around to different rooms to say "badge numbers 1-300 can get in line, now 1-500, now 1-1000, etc." I got disoriented and went in the wrong line first, you were supposed to go to one and then feed into the other, but it all worked out. I blabbered something to Claudia about "I just discovered the show and it's great, thank you so much for putting up with us" <3
Later that evening there was a small filk gathering, which was neat. One woman introduced her song with "I originally learned this in a lyrics-and-chords book called Rise Up Singing, then added some more verses later." and I was like "ohhhh yes, I know that well" (it's one of my mom's standbys, we learned many many many folk songs from this growing up.) The song was not one I knew, it was about a very special rooster who rejuvenates anything and everything he comes across.
Logistics: I did not do due diligence on the research, it was technically "in the Baltimore area" but much farther out than I'd expected. Between one rail system and the next you could get within a ~15-minute walk or so by public transit both Friday evening and Saturday morning, but a 15-minute walk in a business park on a sticky, humid, Maryland day is still not great. For someone who wasn't staying at the hotel, it was hard to know how to order food in the bar, and going out to get food was also a challenge. Then ridesharing back at night was significantly pricier late Saturday than early-ish Friday. (Not a burden for me, just surprising/hadn't counted on it.)
Also, this wasn't specific to me, but the air conditioning system just...did not work in many of the conference rooms. As I pointed out, it was at least a good representation of the Sebacean experience, but really.
I think if I went to this location again, I would splurge and get a hotel room. That being said, the stars really aligned with it being Ben and Claudia this year; this sort of event is more TV-oriented than is my preference (it was originally founded as a Star Trek convention/club), and there are other opportunities more focused on short fiction and media that are my scene, so I might not feel the urge.
Seeing the author guests promoing their books really drove home the "pyramid" aspects of the publishing industry. Like, all of these people are orders of magnitude more prolific/well-known/professional than I am, and there are orders of magnitude more people like me who are nobodies in comparison. But even these people, I've never heard of, and don't really feel like buying their books. Cautionary tale about calibrating what "success" looks like.
The in-person SFF cons I've been to have skewed towards an older demographic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, I am sure there are many aspects of events that would drive me up the wall if they were run by people my age and younger. It's great to be able to engage with filk in person, as someone who's written and read a lot of parodies that broadly fall under that genre but doesn't actually get to sing them with other people. IDK.
Like the amateur con artist once said: "sometimes the cons are the pros and the pros are the cons."
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Date: 7/10/23 12:48 pm (UTC)