A Great Workshop.... even with hiccups
Last weekend we were at the Washington State International Kite Festival (WSIKF) in Long Beach, Washington. It was great to see everyone on the beach, fellow faces, new faces, hundreds of kites filling the sky. For those outside of the Pacific Northwest area, we have been plagued by smoke filled skies from the fires in British Columbia, the Cascades, Oregon, California, everywhere. Put simply.... the West Coast is burning.
Wildfire season comes every summer, but the past few years have been particularly rough. Reports were pouring in every day for the past few weeks that 'today is the worst it has been'. Then the next day "today is worse then yesterday", and more. At one point, the news was saying that the air quality here was worse here than in heavily industrial polluted cities. Thankfully, some relief came in the way of rain during the week (a blessing to the firefighters and those with breathing problems) and helped to clear out the skies a bit over the weekend.
WSIKF is where we met several years ago, and it holds a special place in our hearts. So to return, if only for the weekend, is something special for us. Some time ago Paul proposed to do a free workshop on Sunday morning at the World Kite Museum; Putting Moves to Music. While there are many folks that are out there flying their kites to music, not many have heavily delved into what it really means to choreograph a routine to the music. This isn't meant to take away from the work and skills that they have put in, more a different way of looking at how to perform. A way that has been honed over several decades of flying and been refined through countless competitions and professional performances.
The workshop was well attended, and well received. We packed the room that we had reserved, and found out later there would have been quite a few more had it not been for a small hiccup. Apparently the program had been changed and listed that the workshop was being hosted at the 'Activities Tent' on the field, not at the World Kite Museum a half a mile a way. By the time most people found out, it would have been a long walk down the beach and they would have missed it.
The other little hiccup we had was for those trying to tune into the livefeed we had promised from the event. In the weeks ahead of time all of the cameras and systems had been tested, retested, tested again. The broadcasting software was working like a dream. As we checked off each little test and to-do, we felt confident but guarded. Long Beach has always had connection issues. Whether you are attempting to connect via a hard line or WiFi, or via the cellular networks. Things have been known to get a bit 'glitchy'.
We arrived early, set it up, tested it.... Good to go! Then two minutes into the feed it started dropping huge chunks of the visual, started to stall out, and generally became a headache. Eventually we were able to get the feed back up and running off of one of our phones, but the audio was not as good of quality, nor was the visual as crisp as we had originally planned. Apologies to all of you that were attempting to watch the livefeed. :( We will keep trying to work that out and make it better for the next time.
The good news is there was also a regular camera running the whole time. We are going to chop that full 2 hours into smaller, easier to digest segments and load it to our Youtube Channel. ( click here to go to youtube: Fortuna Found)
The workbook from the workshop is loaded here on our site. Click on the workbook tab in the menu, and find the 'Putting Moves to Music' workshop tab and it will be on the bottom. This is the first edition of this workbook, and on the drive home, we already started revising it for the next edition. A little bit later this week we will post a follow up on the blog with more detailed answers to some of the questions, and some of the items we were unable to cover in the workshop time slot.