Assembly'2002 party report
by Milan Kolarovic (a.k.a. Acumen)
Email: milan@milankolarovic.com
http://www.milankolarovic.com
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Page 1 - 'Page 2' • Animation and wild demo competitions The animation competition's victory went to "Project Kerosene" by Heikki Anttila and Milan Kolarovic.. yes, that's me ;) I did the music and sfx for this very beautiful work of Heikki Anttila, and we won with a clear margin to the second. The results changed a bit after the event as the 2nd placed "Whisky & Martini" was disqualified and "Blue" by Visualice and Melwyn (Haujobb) took the official 2nd place. The reason for disqualification was that the animation had been previously shown at "Clone Film Festival", the very same festival where I had won with "WW2 memoirs (special edition)" on the same year. I must say that the overall quality of the animation competition could have been a lot better.
If the animation competition's quality varied, the wild competition was better than in years. Also the results of the wild demo competition were changed after the event as Yodel's music video got disqualified for the same reason as one the animations, it had been previously released. The competition offered mostly humour based videos with the exception of two pure music videos, Yodel's "What's up (in da gangstahood)" and Fragile's "Furiae" which finished 8th. Almost all videos had used more or less effects which had been added on top of the filmed material. For the most parts they looked excellent. I enjoyed seeing so much effort put in these videos. All three winners (as I like to call them) were entertaining and different from one another. Quite frankly it would've been very hard to predict the results between these three, eventhough "The Way Out" by Unreal Voodoo won with an enormous margin. The revised results brought 2nd place to "The Fellow Chip" by Amazement and 3rd place to "Project Kazama Hunt" by C.C.C.P. Productions. All three of these are well worth downloading. • Flash competition The flash competition this year had a supply of quite versatile productions. Some relied on animation where others resembled more the traditional "demo" format. I had teamed up with Esko Ahonen who last year had taken the 3rd place. We did fine and finished 3rd with "Evolve". I had made a special shortened version of one of my older songs called "Serenity of Silence". A more straightforward and humorous animation called "Kreivi Krapula" by Rapture Seekers took the 2nd place. The winner of the flash competition this year was "Super mushroom sisters" by RNO. The name of this animation serves as an omen for its content. Only 11 productions made it to the screen this year, which signals of ranging quality in the competition entries. After the actual event another flash competition was being organized in a quite tight schedule. The Asus Flash democompo was held on Assembly.org website. It followed the actual Assembly flash compo rules, but had few alterations due to Asus sponsoring the whole contest. The competition actually had better prizes than the actual Assembly flash competition. Just as I had teamed up with Esko Ahonen for the actual Assembly flash competition, we took this new flash competition as a challenge together. The actual works were delivered to Asus representatives who viewed and decided on the winners. The flash animations aren't yet viewable at the time of writing this article, but the results have been up for some weeks. Niko Sipilä won the competition and we took the 2nd place with our flash titled "Flaming Asses". 3rd place went to Jarno Väkeväinen. • Combined demo compo 5000 € / $ in cash was awaiting for the winner of this year's competition. The gap between the two best was extremely small. My own personal favourite "Halla" by Moppi Productions came second with only a margin of 67 points to the winner "Liquid... wen?" by Haujobb. Many of the seen demos featured excellent music, some of which would have certainly competed evenly in the music competitions. The demo competition has come more equally matched every year, and it's positive to see new names arise in the results list. • Seminars
• The concert and the rave This was the first time in Assembly history that a real live concert was organized. In the previous years there were DJs, as there were now, but a real performing of bands was bound to attract more people than raves. The concert was held on friday, starting with CNCD and followed by Crankshaft (a.k.a. Yolk / CNCD) featuring Jugi. After the day had turned in to saturday came Tero (a.k.a. Deetsay of Panic) with his instrument, the C64, and last but not least, Machinae Supremacy featuring Rob Hubbard.. or so we all thought. I wasn't able to attend other concert acts than Machinae Supremacy's due to my jury duties. The biggest hype around Assembly before the event even had started was the alleged perform of Machinae Supremacy featuring Rob Hubbard, but it never happened. Rumours of why it didn't happen spread fast, but so far I haven't heard or seen any official statement nor explanation. Machinae Supremacy did however perform their live concert as planned, but.. too loud. Many of the people who had come to see them perform left before the band had even finished their first song, and I can't blaim them. I was staying way back from the stage, and stayed a little while longer, but since no one did anything to the volume levels, I left cause I didn't want to take the chance of damaging my hearing. The highlight of the rave parties this year was on saturday-sunday night when DJ Orkidea and DJ Proteus were performing. There were also raves held on friday night by more or less unfamiliar names performing. I wasn't so interested in the raves, but I took the oppurtunity to visit the Arena's saloon where they were held on saturday night. It sure sounded good (and not too loud either). • AssemblyTV and the network For the 3rd time the event was broadcast on Helsinki Televion's (HTV) Mosaic Channel, seen on Helsinki cable-tv area and also on AssemblyTV.net website in Real Media and Windows Media streams. Unfortunately the servers (maintained by Sonera) transmiting the streams came quickly overloaded, and the problems lasted out for the whole duration of the event. The contents of the show were pretty much the same as in previous years, although in my opinion the quality of the reporters wasn't as good. I visited the broadcast twice as a guest, on such subjects as commenting the seen wild demos this year. The party network this year went without any bigger problems, atleast to my knowledge. Altogether 3200 computers were connected to the network. They generated roughly (depending of the source) 6000-7000 gigabytes of inbound traffic and around 2000-5000 gigabytes of outbound traffic. • Highlights and thumb up'n downs
+ Game development compo
• Summary
The future of Assembly seems and sounds rock solid. The organizers have managed to squeeze new ideas each year and by that making it a more versatile experience for us all. I personally enjoyed the four sleepless days. My personal thank yous and greetings to all the people whom I had the pleasure of meeting, aswell to those many who have shared their comments and thoughts concerning the seen entries I had contributed. Everything that comes to my own Assembly'2003 participation tempts me. Planns which I had already for this year are waiting to be realized. My only fear is will I have enough time and resources to carry them through. One thing is for sure though, see you all next year at Assembly'03! Related links: Assembly'2002 Official revised results - Assembly's official website - AssemblyTV website - Scene.org Assembly directory - MBnet's Awake.
~ Milan Kolarovic (a.k.a. Acumen) |
As the event itself has grown bigger and bigger every year, so has everything
else on side aswell. This year the thing were the
The quality and output of the seminars which I attended was in overall good,
and this most likely goes with all the other seminars aswell. Out of those
seminars which I took part the best was without a doubt Bjorn Lynne's.
He's a very natural performer in front of audience, which made the seminar's
athmosphere very warm. His seminar concerned DirectMusic with examples on
the production techniques and tools. After each seminar people had a chance
to talk a little to the speakers. In Rob Hubbard's case you had a chance to
get an autograph on your Commodore 64.