Cruise News

I got back from my vacation last Tuesday, and am finally caught up on (most of) my email and stuff. On board the Disney Magic I got to present WALL-E at a midnight showing, and I did two presentations: one about Pixar Animation in general, and one about the Making of WALL-E.

I would estimate that about 80-100 people showed up for the first talk, and overall it went very well. I had expected that it would be open to general audiences, and had therefore included some sillier, kid-friendly material, but it turned out that these events were limited to adults. Nevertheless the audience was receptive to the silly stuff as well and the more sophisticated stuff. This was a Disney cruise, after all! My prepared material for the first talk lasted for exactly 45 minutes, as planned, and then I opened it up for Q&A. They had plenty of questions, and I was prepared to run longer than 15 minutes. At noon on the dot, my microphone cut out and the captain came on the PA to start making some announcements in a droning voice. It was annoying, but funny, and after about 5 minutes I got my mic back and could finish the last few questions.

My second presentation was at 1pm the next day. I expected everything would go smoothly, since we had worked out the tech setup the day before. Of course, that was not to be the case. Around 12:15 as we were setting up my computer crashed, and my Keynote presentation file got corrupted. I could no longer launch my presentation! I tried for about 20 minutes to resurrect the data, but with no success. Luckily I had burned a backup copy to DVD before we left home, so I ran back to our room to grab it. In the time remaining before the presentation started I was able to update the backup with most of the changes I had made over the past week. Always back up your data, kids! From there the presentation went off without a hitch. I think I had more people in the audience this time, and there were many repeat visitors from the previous talk.

I was also happy to see that people didn't seem upset by the portrayal of the human cruise-liner passengers in the film. I'm sure you can appreciate the irony of this venue. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed WALL-E, so it was a friendly and fun experience.