This year was my second year as the Photography/Video head for  furrymigration and I made one major mistake which impacted my entire weekend:

I underestimated the amount of staff I needed. For anyone who's ever staffed a con you know this is one of the Fatal errors. And I should have learned this lesson a long time ago with Midwest Furfest...

I kinda saw it was coming; so I said "Okay I'll do video and just video. I won't bounce back and forth between photography and video. And I'll be FINE" That probably kept me from becoming DEAD, but I very much underestimated how much work "Just Video" would be.

I made the assumption that its a lot easier to get Skilled Photographers then Videographers; which in our local community is true. We have a lot of talented Photographers... Videographers that can be bound to a set schedule and limits around here are a very very rare breed. I kinda touched on this in my last Journal post.

What I underestimated is how much just the Stock Videography (Keeping tabs on recording of Mainstage and Panel programming video) alone would take. And really, that by itself is almost a full time staff position.

I spent a lot more time with setup then I had expected. Poking myself with a knife (albeit not very deep. Just deep enough to make it sore and irritating) in the left thumb during setup made things annoying as well.

In the end, I got hours upon hours of video. Much like I expected to happen. However, I did miss some content I was aiming to record because I slipped on checking on a battery or a tape; or in one case the schedule got changed and I was too busy running my tail off to check my twitter, con book or other sources to see that it had changed.

I got a lot less wandering video then I wanted. Yes I did manage to get some, and for sure can put together atleast one video from it... but there were a lot of things I missed. I didn't get any video outside of the hotel when a few daring souls wore their costumes downtown. I didn't get any video in the lobby and other common spaces other then when we dumped the Fursuit Parade down there. I didn't get any video of people interacting with the Delorian, or the Pinball machines or... *sigh* I could go on.

In short, I learned my lesson (Again) that for Photography and Videography at a con its really really hard to pull it off as a one man show. During the Con I recruited atleast 2 staff photographers... one more who may help out when he can as he is staff for another department already.

Admitting where I fell short, I put a post out for help for Video next year right after the Con was over. I got two responses within the next day; one of whom defiantly knows his stuff and I feel perfectly comfortable putting in more of a Lead position for Videography next year.

This year... I'll do the best with what I got. I have enough content to still make things entertaining. I may be able to fill in some holes if other people are willing to throw video from Furry Migration 2015 my way (Yes please and Thank you!)

Next year, things will be different. Like MWFF I'll have an actual staff chart laid out. I'll have set hours for people. We will spread everything around so no one gets burned out and we all get the ability to enjoy some of the convention; it really didn't happen for me minus the one thing I got to do which I wanted to do which was the Nerf War...

So now back to editing video and making due with what I have content wise. I know I still got some good content that will be fun to post up (I already did a video on the Nerf War on my Youtube, which I will put up as a submission soon)