Episode 8 - EYUC and Copa Cabana

It's been a long wet summer in the UK and myself and Steve have not
done as much Blockstack stuff as we have in previous years, but we are
finishing with a bang.

Our latest episode covers:-
- European Youth Ultimate Championships, Steve's report and the
trailer from the official DVD. (Which is awesome)
- Report and Interviews from Copa Cabana 2009 plus news about the
plans for the 2010 tournament.
- Fundrazr, a new way to organise your teams money and payments.
- Our plans for XEUCF
- All wrapped up with our witty banter on the new lux leather couch.

We'll be doing two episodes from the eXtended European Ultimate
Championship Finals in London. So watch out for those next week.

Cheers
Tom and Steve

CUC Nationals Stream!

Our good friend Tushar over in Canada is perfecting some killer streaming technology and we're helping! Below we've embedded a player for his CUC live game camera! CUC is the Canadian Ultimate Championships. The finals are going to be broadcast this Sunday starting around 3 GMT (9am Central) as it's being held in Winnipeg Manitoba. The absolute middle of Canada.

Tune in...
(Tushar at iamultimate.com sends his apologies for the trouble with the feed it's a learning experience. Thanks to everyone for their patience)

Signing off from Paganello 2009

Myself and Steve have been back in the UK for a couple of days. As is
customary with these things our final Paganello episode took quite a
lot of putting together. But it is live now and we both agree it's one
of the best episodes of blockstack.tv we've ever made.

If you have trouble explaining to your buddies at work why you look
tired, tanned, but ultimately content on the Wednesday after Easter,
sending them a link to blockstack.tv should make things much
easier.

As always we'd love to hear your feedback. show@blockstack.tv is the
email for all your comments.

There are a few people we need to say thank you to. Firstly our
partners in crime Linz Wilkinson and Tony Leonardo for their hard work
and support. The whole Paganello family, Jumpi, Bunny, Rambo, Rafa,
and the whole Rimini ultimate scene, for their support and assistance. To Mick
Mengucci, for the use of his music. myspace.com/misturpura To
all the players and teams who gave us interviews, and encouragement.

Blockstack.tv will be back in the summer.

So long until then.

Tom and Steve

Paganello 2009 Friday

Officially, Jumpi apologizes for not having enough Vino Rosso on Thursday night, suggesting that the plebians under him failed to satisfy the thirsty crowds and will be executed.

For anyone who came to Paganello last year, today was an apology for the weather of the 2008 event. A tad foggy but generally we were all blessed with what could be arguably called perfect Ultimate weather.

The Open division went to plan unfortunately making a slow news day for us. The crowd were enthused and baying for an upset in the early Boracay vs Scandal clash. The match started off close to 5s before Scandal was able to pull away without difficulty. The Dragons did still provide a fulfilling dose of the dynamic style of play for the cheering crowd, complimented by Paga love child and Ulti-Author Tony Leonardo’s freakish height and facial fur. The Dragons first created interest with their unexpected finals appearance more than a year ago in Maceio Brazil. Seeded an almost intentionally humble 25th they will continue to be the official dark horse throughout the early stages of the tournament. Meanwhile, Jumpi is pregnant with a bambino Paga, again.

Also in the Arena fans got to see the French Friselis take an 11-9 over the Finns on Hattitwat until Hattitwat brought it to 11s, next point wins. After a Friselis turnover, Hatti had the disc to win but could not and Friselis escaped to win. Tomorrow they will move up to play Los Ox and UTI.

In the Women’s division, the favourites stayed on top, although fourth seeded The Have needed double game point to escape the Spanish-Japanese Nadeshiko. The Have are a phoenix from the ashes of a series of top British female Paganello champions including Bliss and Cake or Death. Top seed “That’s It” remained on top and even recruited a young bambina, 12 years old, from Bologna to play with them. However the girl decided to stay with the Bologna juniors team. Word from Fatima on “That’s It” is that their name comes from the comedian/musicians Flight of the Conchords’ song Business Time. The girls of Super Hot Pot would like to make it crystal clear that the word Pot is NOT short for Potato. Under no circumstances should anyone refer to them as this delicious food or shout from the sideline “Go Potatos!”.

One of the Tanias from the Ukrainian Dyki Krali normally plays for a team in Bagdad and regularly has practice during extreme dust storms that normally keep regular dwellers of Iraq sealed into their homes. We’re thinking she’ll be the one to watch if our sunny Paga weather takes a turn for the worst.

In Mixed, Czech’s Yellow Fever had the upset of the day over the Arrrrr pirates. Ireland’s 23rd seed Binge nearly pulled off a move to the upper pools by beating Ah Ou Puc, but point differential with them and Sugar Mix favored the Germans by a single point, and so Sugar Mix and Ah Ou Puc advanced and Ireland was relegated. Disc-O-Fever seeded bottom of their pool at an unassuming 28th seed managed to rock the boat upsetting Shocker and Morning Glory to finish one below regulars Huck Finn. Their green and yellow jump suits are apparently the source of their power. The 13th seeded Lamantino Tonante embraced the spirit of Paganello far earlier that most plummeting down to the 29th position.

Tech Noir fought hard by overcoming a three-goal deficit to tie Flugsaurier at game point before a patient Austrian team worked the disc in effectively for the win. Both teams now face the defending champions Huck Finn in the upper pool.

The Russian Shadows surprised eight-seeded Hardfisch with a 12-18 win. Their women’s team Sharks also played well.

Myself and Steve have been hard it since we arrived and will be uploading the fruits of work so far tomorrow morning. Steve wrote this article I'm just posting it.

Blockstack at Paganello 2009

It's almost Easter and while many of you will be happily munching your way through your 4th chocolate egg, myself and Steve will be working to bring you all the best bits of the greatest show on sand. Paganello MMIX promises to be an event to remember. We'll be there every step of the way.

As you know Blockstack TV is the hottest ultimate internet TV show ever to rock your digital world. We make video podcasts about Ultimate.

This year Blockstack has a bigger crew, we've recruited the tallest camera girl we could find in the shape of the lovely Linz Wilkinson, and we're also going to be working with the legend that is Tony Leonardo. Tony is playing with the much fancied Boracay Dragons so we'll be sure to bring you the inside track on their progress through the tournament.

4 days of Ultimate, 4 nights of parties, and 4 podcasts to showcase all the action.

You can subscribe to Blockstack TV via iTunes, RSS or you can put our show player on your team's website. Visit our subscribe page for more information.

Lastly we really want to make sure we deliver what you want out of the show, if you have any ideas, requests or comments, please email show@blockstack.tv.

Clip Shows are Hard!

Once again we've been delayed in getting a show out because of this blasted clip show we intended on releasing as our 1st anniversary show. Well in true BlockStack fashion we've managed to bite off more than we can chew (for now) as it seems doing a clip show is actually really really hard!

You wouldn't think it would be considering most sitcoms tend to slot in a clip show whenever it seems like they all want a week off or if there's a strike of some kind. It should be a doddle to knock one of these out right? Wrong. It's a day off for the actors of sitcoms (in this case Tom and myself) but it's a freakin nightmare for the editors and researchers of the clips (Tom and myself...((mostly me))) having to pour over more than 55 hours of footage (see previous blog post for stats) just to find all of the funny bits and of course the outtakes that never even made it to a show.

Let me add to the difficulty by admitting that I archived all of our footage to my big server computer which happens to live in my loft. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because my loft has no heating and if you hadn't noticed, it's cold outside. It is therefore very very cold inside my loft making working in there limiting if you value fingers and toes.

So the decision has been make to crank together more BlockStack episodes...Hooray!! but make them shorter and more bite sized...good!(?) and do the 1.5 year anniversary show in the summer when it's nice and warm and worth a nice lofty lounge editing session.

I promise it'll be 1.5 times funnier as well.

Post Vancouver

Life after WUGC 2008

It's been more than a month since we've been back from Worlds and it's flown by just as quickly as the event itself. The memories are vivid highlights of the week.

* Ground breaking webcasting we did with Ultivillage
* Match Diesel smashing his fists on the walls of the commentator booth in frustration/excitement (and then not exactly admitting this on his blog)
* My being in a hot tub with two sexy but completely vacant women on my birthday while spraying
Allison and our expensive camera with cheap Champagne for 'effect' and somehow not getting sh*t for it.

There's too much more to mention.

The entire year leading up to WUGC2008 is a blur. Blockstack.tv started partly as an excuse to go to Vancouver and watch the worlds best players play the game we play. Who wouldn't want that? Tom and I talked about Lookflynews.com that Tom and I did for WUGC 2004 in Turku. Back then Tom went alone with a rather large group of volunteers including some now GB stars like Caesar, Brummie, Danny Hoyle and more. I stayed home and did editing :(. We thought we'd update the delivery method and reduce the man-power this time. Our purpose would be to create some video podcasts of our time there to give people a real feel for the event. I thought... 'I would enjoy that if I wasn't there.' Great! We had enough forethought this time to start early, actually learn how to do video editing, learn how to properly use a microphone and camera, and try to build up some viewers in advance so we weren't just there suddenly doing all this work recording and reporting and editing for 10 viewers a day. Tom and I found our areas of expertise, him mostly in front of the camera and myself mostly on editing and camera work. It all worked really well producing an Unplanned/Fantasy Football meets Waynes World style of show.

Fast-fowarding ahead to just over a week prior to WUGC, Tom and I were bricking it because we'd had no response from the WUGC staff in spite of contacting them well in advance. Tom had been turned down for the official announcers job (yes the guy, 2nd only to Tony Leonardo, who has done more event and Ultimate related commentary and public speaking than anyone in the world was looked off) and we thought this was going to end up being completely guerilla coverage with no support at all.
Enter Ultivillage. Patrick (Dick) Cloutier emails us and he's watched the commentary trailer kindly made for Tom by Si Williams and loved it. He doesn't know boo about me but wants us together to do commentary on the first ever webcast for the show-game between Canada and Great Britain!!! Whoah! We've got contacts, we've got free broadband, we've got VIP access and media passes. We're in.

What a week it was! I highly recommend going to an event like Worlds as a spectator. You've got the highest quality Ultimate being played non-stop to an extent that you can't possible watch all the games you want. Vancouver was beautiful and made me slightly homesick for the first time in years and the event itself was executed as smooth as you could hope for and more.

This may sound ridiculous or obvious but BlockStack has a tendency to make it all up as we go along. We thought for this though, we'd get some real planning in. Not to be. Once again we found ourselves pouring over the schedule each morning at the all you can eat buffet breakfast (sweet!) and planning the day which was loosely around key games. Unlike other events, at first we weren't allowed to film games because of the Ultivillage DVD deal. We were going to have to be more creative for sure. In spite of the additional pressure, most of the planning went to into the bin and we were filming primarily using distraction as our guide. If our attention was gathered by something then surely viewers would want to see this. Brilliant. Distractions plus big games = podcast: and we did this daily, spending most of our evenings at the computers editing hours of video into 30 minute shows while the ladies fetched food and drink. Credit to our ladies Alli and Catrin for putting up with all this.

So all is going well and suddenly Ultivillage come to us with a proposition. Do commentary on new daily webcasts from the show pitch and also for all 6 finals on Friday and Saturday. YEAH!!! Whoah hold on! How will we do the podcast if we're webcasting the whole time? With Difficulty. We brought in a few friends (Chris and June) to join the regular crew helping to film some stuff for us in the final days. Perfect! We did the commentary and it was a blast! Tom and I came up with new techniques for double teaming the play by play when you only get a semi-correct roster 5 minutes before. This largely consisted of one of us starting it off and forging on until we didn't know/remember a name and using a description and a switch of commentator. "HUGE SWING ACROSS THE BACK TO THE GIRL IN THE DISTINCTIVE YELLOW CAP... ...MELANIE HILL WHO MAKES A GREAT BID ON A DISC TROUBLED BY THE WIND"). It was great.

Sitting in the sun shine talking crap about your favourite sport with a good buddy, watching some great games, all the time receiving emails from around the world telling you what a great job you were doing. It's hard to imagine things working out better. We'll post some of our favourite emails in a future blog post. But rest assured if you did email us that we read every email that came in and almost all of them made us smile.

Unfortunately our finals episode did suffer in the end because of our own lack of attention to filming and especially our lack of editing time for it. Two days of finals footage and we had to check out of the compound the day after only giving about 6 hours editing time max. Not enough.

We're calling it a big fat success. I can't believe we haven't celebrated what we've accomplished yet. Two guys knowing nothing about modern video editing, camera work, how to podcast or even how to present a tv show ended up with VIP media passes at WUGC 2008, being
the faces and voices of the first EVER Ultimate webcasts with Ultivillage and released daily shows from the event with tight editing and interviews with all the top players in the World!

We're a little pleased with ourselves at the moment. This is the reason for what I said in the beginning. It's been a while since BlockStack has popped up and is enjoying a much needed break.

To put some perspective on the what we've accomplish and the price of it, here's some stats on the show so far
Total number of Shows: 8 in Vancouver, 2 in Copenhagen, 4 in Paganello, plus 6 on the sofa.
Hours of footage recorded: 55
Hours spent editing (appoximately): 160
Money spent on equipment: £2000 +- £100
Money spent on travel: £2,000+ each
Most watched show: WUGC 2008 - Monday Masterstroke (Ep 4) http://blip.tv/file/1146898
Total views (all shows): 38,000 and counting

We just need some time off to gather our thoughts, restock the holiday time and save some money and maybe take a nice bath. We'll be back.