Cram sessions...

So this past weekend Atec had it's Game Development Weekend. Pretty much it is a 72 hour cram session in which to create a whole entire video/computer game. I've never taken part in any of the past ones since my focus isn't in creating video games, but I decided to actually par-take in a way this semester. I spent time through out the whole weekend shooting video of the large group of students that were forgoing sleep in the hopes to create a final product. I shot at different times such as 2-7 in teh afternoon and 12-3 in the morning. People came and went. Some only worked a few hours and others stayed the whole weekend. It really came down to what skills people had, and how committed that really were. I ended up gathering up to 4 hours worth of footage in the hope that I will be able to create a 5-6 minute pod-cast to publish to the net to show people just what Atec does in the hetic weekend. Through my shooting I couldn't help but think about the 24-hour video race that I and other students partake in each May. Pretty much Atec sponsers 2-3 teams of college students where we have 24 hours to create a 5 minute film. It's a lot of fun, but also a lot of work given how much work you have to due to lack of sleep. You really start to see how much work and time goes into these pieces of work. I have to admit though, after witnessing the game dev weekend and have worked through multiple 24-hour video races, that you start to realize the work that goes into the creation a real piece of work. I mean with the game dev and video race, you are done after that that short time period. For most, they will never go back to it ever again, with never having to worry about losing anything. With major production companies though, they have so much more to do. You can't just walk away after one weekend. Whether it is a film or video game, these people end up having to work multiple months and over 80 hours a week. Some will go without a day off for many weeks, because for many of them, there is so much invested into it financially, emotionally and physically that if it fails, that is it. It could mean the end of their job let along the possbily end of that company. It really makes me look at how different things really are when it comes to creating content for the net. I'm not saying that the people creating podcast don't put a lot of work into them, but with a lot of the ones that I have seen, these people don't have so much invested into them. I have their income coming from some where else. They just create these podcast in my opinion for one of two reasons. Either to see if they can create the next great show, or because they are board and just have nothing better to do. I think it will be interesting to see what it's going to be like when some of these podcast actualy make it really big and see where it will go from there.