Assembly'2001 Party Report
       by Milan Kolarovic (a.k.a. Acumen)

Assembly'2001, the 3rd Assembly event for me - and I guess it's safe to say it did the charm for me. The largest Nordic demo-scene event had its 10th birthday this year, as Hartwall Arena filled up again of monitors and brite lites ;) Over 4000 people attended the 4 day event during 2nd-5th August. I myself couldn't make it on scene until Friday due to the delays and workload I still had to prepare in order to get my own Wild Demo finished in time. The event itself has grown bigger and bigger by every year, attracting more and more sideshows in form of live televion broadcasts from the scene, more media attention, more all kinds of competitions, et cetera. The live AssemblyTV broadcast was seen on Helsinki Televion's (HTV) Mosaic Channel in Helsinki cable-TV network area, and worldwide through AssemblyTV.net's website. This year's small amount of my own competitions entries (no mp3/multichannel) was not only explainable due to the big amount of work with my video, but also by music themes I had made for AssemblyTV to be used with broadcasts. A funny coinsidence was that as I was still home on thursday when the opening ceremony took place, as I logged into the stream from AssemblyTV.net to watch the ceremony, I heard my "Adagio for Freedom" playing in the event's Opening Intro (2) background. Besides making music for the channel, I was interviewed on sunday morning, mainly concerning my Wild Demo and music making. You can download the finnish interview (in DivX format) here. Now to the actual report. I'm mainly going to cover my own experiences and involvement concerning the event and competitions that I something about, since I only have my own notes to rely on besides my bad memory. So let's begin. • Jurying This year I didn't have time personally to attend purely music compos due to my wild demo, but I took part of jury duties along some of the most legendary guys in the scene like Skaven, Purple Motion, Captain and many others. A large amount of entries were submitted this year, and the jury duties for both MP3 and Multichannel compo took about 7 hours together. Being part of jury is fun, but also tiring, cause it happens on the second night in upper floors of Hartwall Arena. The long night's constrainment can probably be best seen on Skaven's heavy eyelids. • MP3 & Multichannel There were quite a few rememberable songs heard in the MP3 competition final. My own favourites were the enchantingly beautiful saxophone song called "Let the Melody speak" by Turkka (feat. Sakari Ainali) which came in 8th position. It has one of most beautiful melodies in its chorus I've heard in a long time. Reminds me a lot of the tv-serie Hercule Poirot's theme. I'd love to get my hands on the song and remix it into a massive big beat version. My other favorite was "Molequel Man" by Trauma Child Genesis (which consists of Teque & !Cube) which came in 4th place. If the previous song had beautiful saxophone melodies, this one has them with lead sounds. I also enjoyed Purple Motion's (and Logick's) "Mosaic Days" which achieved 6th position. It's an untypical rock song with nice female vocals that arise into a head climax in form of a powerful chorus. The winner, "When Time Slips Away" by Firestorm / Waypoint, wasn't bad at all either and deserved it's place at the top. In all and all, the quality of the entries this year was in my opinion better than last year, and the material in overall was a lot more competitive against eachothers. As for the Multichannel competition, I don't have much of recollections of any of the songs since the overall quality was very poor, even up to the 10 finalists (only 10 finalists were chosen instead of 15 due to the quality issues). The future of Multichannel competitions at Assembly is at stake. The risk is that there won't be any anymore. • Wild Demos Wild demo competition, which is known of being combined mostly of humorous homevideos, was my main (and only) competition I had been preparing for this year. For my pleasant surprise I reached 2nd place with my "World War II memoirs" video. Starting from around January, I had composed a soundtrack and edited the video to go along with it, all made out of real World War II black and white photographs. It was a close call that I didn't miss the show, since it took an extra day and 4 cd-r's before I actually had a working version I could leave with, and even then I had to jump into the last train while it was already moving out from the station. That's how close it all came in the end, and this is also the reason why the end part of the video is not as carefully thought out as I would have wanted. I had to scrape the last minutes of the video between thursday and friday night. I agree with you all who have critized the ending, and I have planns of releasing a DivX version of the new edition. It remains to be seen how much my Wild Demo actually influenced people, both behind and in front of the screen, meaning that how much people making these demos will now stop to think more ways to present stories than just relying on humour, and the other factor is how the audience will from now onwards think about different aspects of story-telling. What I hope is that my influence and contribution with my idea brought people closer to good moral values, sensibility, awareness and reminded them how things don't necessarily have to be done with familiar ways of presenting. I just hope that pure copy-cats and mimics wouldn't arise, but more genuine and unique ideas carefully planned and orchestrated. The Wild Demo competitions victory went to tAAt's "LeGorSIKA" , which was a sequal to their last year's winning demo "Legorso". I myself liked Legorso more than this sequal, but it doesn't change my opinion that they rightfully deserved to be number one. After all, I cannot imagine the workload there has to be in making a video with Lego-figures. Also Sunflower's "Lackluster: 13/10/99" was really beautiful, and deserves a special mention. The most enchanting visuality was certainly seen there. I wonder what programs were used in creating his video's beautiful scenery. Sunflower's Wild Demo came in 4th with only losing by 64 point margin to the 3rd position. • Other highlights and thumb downs .. + Yodel's winning console demo "Delicious" for Dreamcast had one of the most "Delicious" musics I heard during the entire event, and the visuality was nothing short of tasty either ;) + "Lapsuus" by MatureFurk won the combined demo competition with an astonishing Amiga demo. + Organizing in overall deserves a plus. Everything worked fine, atleast for a party visitor like me who hadn't brought his computer to the scene. - Zepo (voting system) was overcrowded on Sunday, and so the organizers had to eliminate the possibility of voting for all the previous day's competitions. For those who wanted to vote for all the competitions on the last day, this naturally ment they could only vote for Sunday's events. • Summary Overall the event went through without any major hassle, and atleast I enjoyed the 4 day marathon all the way through. What comes to Assembly'2002, I cannot say for sure, but I'm tempted in trying to improve both my work and accomplishments. I just hope I have time to do that besides other activities. Last but not least, I want to thank you all the people who came in contact with me after the event, and for all the comments and feedback you gave. Thank you, I really appreaciate it. See you all next year at Assembly'02!          ~ Milan Kolarovic (a.k.a. Acumen) 07.12.2001                milan@milankolarovic.com Related links : Assembly's official website Assembly Television's website MBnet's Awake