Adventures in Vegas: That Just Happened!

I fly home from Las Vegas tomorrow after jetting up for two days to attend the BEA (Broadcast Education Association) Conference, Fesitval and Awards. A group project (which was actually the product of two separate classes) that I worked on placed first in the student interactive multimedia category. Since I did some of the web design for the project, my name was put on the entry, and thus, I was invited up to accept the award on behalf of the two classes.

This is a bit of a sidetrack from this story and it will make sense in a second, but have you ever been to the website TVTropes.org? Basically its a wiki for the various plot lines and jokes you see in TV and movies over and over again. One such trope is the “And The Winner Is” gag, where an award is being announced and an over-confident favorite assumes he or she has won and just as they’re standing up, the name called by the presenter is someone else’s (sometimes an unlikely underdog).

Okay, so this exact thing didn’t happen to me, but it was eerily similar. See, it turns out my school had won two awards in this category so a fellow student who worked on another project was there also, as well as a few faculty and staff from the school.

Names were not associated with the awards as they were announced (class names were used instead), and when my award was announced, something got mixed up between the other student and one of the faculty members and they wound up jumping up and accepting the award. She also happened to be sitting at the end of the aisle, which made their trip to the front of the room quick.

My ass was quite literally an inch off my seat to stand up and go get the award when I saw the other student jump up and hustle to the front. Then her award was announced next and she got up again.

Later on after the small ceremony was over, everyone realized the mistake and a few apologies were extended, but I really didn’t care to be honest. Sure, the award is a fine accomplishment, and it will find a nice comfortable spot on my resume and portfolio, but I wasn’t distraught over not getting to walk up, shake some stranger’s hand, and snag a box of plaques (which were immediately handed over to school faculty).

To be honest the “ceremony”, if you can call it that, was pretty lame. It was one session in a long series of awards events, and thus it was in a tiny room the size of a schoolroom, and about a dozen people were actually there. Woopity doo. It was scheduled for 2:45-4:30, and the thing was done by 2:55, so I’m not upset that the actual 10 minutes of this trip that I came for didn’t go as planned. No big deal, whatsoever.

I’ve seen and done so much more interesting things while I’ve been here. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you saw me mention seeing a pair of street-dwellers argue iPad vs. Kindle, and just tonight I passed a lounge in Bally’s where a decent sized band and sexy gogo dancers were pumping up their pittance of an audience with only the sexiest, funkiest, rockin’est song out there — that’s right, “Party in the U.S.A.” by Ms. Miley Cyrus.

I also got to see the Cirque du Soleil Beatles “LOVE” show at The Mirage tonight, and I must say that it is quite honestly the most amazing production of any sort I have ever witnessed. It was also the closest thing to a live Beatles concert I will ever get the chance to see. By that I mean I got to listen to the best songs of The Beatles with a large energetic crowd (not as many screaming girls, though the sounds were pumped in at one point), smoke machines, lazers, lighting effects, projections, dancing, and of course, at a loud volume in an intimate setting.

Aside from the Beatles side of the show, the visual production was absolutely stunning. I’m sure the other CdS shows are equally mind-blowing, but I think having this one set to popular music with well known themes (World War II, The 60s and hallucinogenic drugs to name a few) made this even more enjoyable. That being said, the dancers, actors, acrobats, gymnasts and everyone else involved in the show were ridiculously amazing to watch perform.

What I liked best about the show was the variety of activities going on from song to song. There was acting going on with basic choreography, there was elegant traditional dancing, modern dancers, break dancers, athletic balancing acts, gymnastic performers twirling and bouncing around, free running style choreography that was very much like Parkour, roller-skaters doing half-pipe style tricks (give those X-Games kids a job!), trampoline tricks, arial acrobatics, bungee rope dancing, guys on stilts, prop artists, rope climbers (many of which are clearly risking their lives each night to perform these feats of balance and acrobatics), and SO SO SO SO much more.

Every few songs there were projected video interludes featuring silhouettes of the Fab Four being their usual joking self which often included off-the-record recordings from studio sessions in which they joked around and riffed on their songs. And the other major amazement from the show was the amazing feats of set design. The floor had various portions that would raise or lower (several feat below the main level, you couldn’t see the bottom from where I was (which was almost in the last row), and there were intricate props that made the show even more stunning than just the performers.

At one point, a dream is symbolized by four kids (young versions of the Beatles) riding a bed through the clouds. The bed was on wires and the sheets of the bed were pulled out by other cast members and seemed to go on forever (like a cloun pulling a kerchief from his pocket). They ran up the aisles of the round theater and covered half the audience and waved the sheets to symbolize the clouds as the bed floated around. It was amazing.

During the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds portion, the room went pitch black and wires with a string lights on them lowered throughout the theater. A light production which played out to emphasize parts of the music appeared using the strands of lights (kinda like Christmas tree lights), and since they had been lowered all around, it was like seeing stars in the sky in 3D.

The music is amazing too, not just because its The Beatles, but because of the job the producers did of mixing, blending and breaking down the tunes. They were also digitally remastered, and they sound amazing. I’ve had the soundtrack for a few years now, but it was great to hear it on a huge sound system with the visual presentation.

To sum up, the show had be saying “Wow” every time I wasn’t signing along to the songs. I’ve seen a lot of cool shit in my life, and this show ranks up there with the best of it all. I highly recommend it to anyone, it is certainly worth every penny of the high-priced tickets.