The Headquarters of the Masons in Covent Garden was the venue for this event a birthday party for a series of corporate magazines. I was asked to work on the iPad which is usual for me now but unusally I was asked to supply the screen. The easiest way for me to do this is to take along my desktop set up that I use in my studio at home. 27" iMac with Wacom Cintiq attached. A first for me and although I use it daily in the studio I needed to familiarise myself to working in a slightly different manner at an event.
I'm used to jumping on the train or into my car and breezing along to the venue with very little baggage so this different way of working needed some planning. I left with plently of time to get there very early, unload, find a parking place and get set up in the venue with time to sort out any unforseen problems.
However things did not pan out that way. The traffic was unusally heavy and simply got worse and worse until the final mile took more than half an hour to complete. A frantic phone call to the organiser. A nightmare loading in trying to navigate through a 1000 excited guests also trying to get into the venue. Another nightmare trying to decipher a parking sign more complicated than one of Dan Brown's codes. Another nightmare when they opened the doors to the guests long before I was ready for them. No time whatsoever to iron out any problems or test anything as a queue had formed all around me in anticipation of whatever it was I was about to offer them. I had to fend off a thousand questions whilst trying to concentrate of setting up the equipment.
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The funny handshakes were all mine. I was so stressed I felt like I'd completed my session before it had even begun. Luck was on my side that day because everything just worked as if I'd been practicing for weeks. The venue's email worked efficiently which is almost unheard of and I had a steady queue of happy punters throughout the evening. I even got to have a break and bit of cold pizza.
All's well that ends well they say and I really enjoyed this method of working. The punters clearly enjoyed it too as I got some terrific feedback from the event organisers.
