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manifest

Manifest 2008
I promised myself I'd get this done within a week of Manifest. It lacks a little proof reading and coherent thought because I wanted it done, but here it is, in glorious random order.

Art Comps

The range of art competitions Manifest runs has been dwindling. A few years ago there were competitions for the T-shirt art, poster, post card, mascot, and programme book cover. I feel that the idea was that there would be more as the convention got more complicated. Instead these comps have been disappearing. In place of some of it Manifest has been moving toward commissioning a single artist to produce graphics for the year. This means that the art has been of a reasonably high quality and has been quite consistent across the board. This has served Manifest well and taken some organising strain off the committee, but I don't think it's a win for the goals of Manifest.

The competitions were basically an excuse to give out prizes to encourage and promote local artists. This is one of the reasons Manifest exists. Some years the art styles and quality have varied wildly and this has made Manifest look more amateur than the more unified look presented this year, but I think I prefer the more community-oriented approach.

One thing dropping all these art competitions has allowed is OzTaku to step into the gap. Increasingly Avi and the OzTaku crew have been running art events, competitions and getting artists involved and active in the convention. This has generally been a good thing but I don't think it should be taken for granted. There is a point at which it's just not in OzTaku's interest to keep doing more things at Manifest. Avi has his own convention to cause him enough stress. The way Iron Artist was dropped this year should be taken as an indication that the time and energy resources of Avi and crew are not infinite and Manifest should put a bit more of its own effort into getting artists involved in the convention.

Website

I wasn't a fan of this year's website design, mostly because it's broken at my screen resolution. Perhaps 1024x768 is the new 640x480 but because I don't have my browser take up the whole of my screen, the menu along the top is extended off the edge. And it doesn't come into view when you scroll. Firefox and Safari both render it the same way. I didn't even know there was an "Other" menu until I'd viewed it on a computer with a bigger screen. Other than this broken menu I'd rate the website reasonably highly for design. The colours and art art good and it's all quite legible.

The website changes form year to year as each new webmaster comes along. This is probably not a good thing - reinventing the wheel every year is effort that doesn't need to be expended. I'd like to see Manifest have a website designed with all the modern content management magic kids these days are doing, accessible, clean and standards-compliant. And then I'd like to see it last more than 12 months.

A token effort was made to make location and time of committee meetings public, but they soon went back to being unannounced. After last year's big plea for new committee, this is really disappointing. I think if Manifest feels that it needs new committee, it should be putting at least the very basic effort in of telling people where and when to go to join up, not expecting them to somehow magically know.

Treasury and Registration

I was going to complain that rego prices has skyrocketed. At first I thought this was balanced slightly by a lower child registration, but it's gone up too.


Click to zoom

Notes about ze graph: I don't think there was pre-registration for 2000, so it's not included. There were club registrations for 2006-2008 but they're an increasingly small percentage of the registrations. Where Manifest had early and late pre-registrations, I've taken the early price.

I'm not too sure on what percentage of Manifest attendees are under 16. It was around 50% two or three years ago but I only ever saw it worked out for one year's worth of rego data and I don't know if the demographic has shifted since.

I don't know why Manifest has the distinction between adult and child registrations. It's not like that case can't be made that over-16s aren't broke, starving uni students. The difference between adult and child pricing is very large: up to 40% on some memberships. The message this sends is pretty clear: Manifest wants more kids and fewer adults.

Which is really disappointing. Manifest stands apart from other anime conventions in Australia in a number of ways but one way I've always felt was very important was that it was much more adult than any of the others. Manifest hosted the first yaoi panel, allowed adult art in art competitions and the art show, adult fanfic in that competition, and has not shied away from showing anime that is unsuitable for children. Sometimes this has meant that Manifest has had to check ID at the entrance to a theatre, but it was an important part of Manifest's commitment to be more like a film festival than an amusement park.

Bang for buck, this year represents the lowest value I think Manifest has ever offered. It was probably still worth it, and you can make the argument that something is worth whatever people will pay for it.

The thing is, Manifest was making rather large amounts of money before this year. 2008 saw arguably less event than the year before but at a much higher membership fee. Some of the per-attendee increase could be blamed on the use of an outside organisation for online payment processing, EventOFFICE. I'd guess that these registrations represented 25-40% of all registrations. There's a fee ($5.50) for each person registered this way. Over all attendees that probably accounts for about $2 of the price increase.

But what happened to the rest of it? Even considering the under-16 discount, the average membership price jumped a long way up, and Manifest certainly didn't seem to be spending that money anywhere on the event. On top of already high (if not obscene) retained earnings from previous financial years the ostensibly not-for-profit Manifest is looking more than a bit dodgy.

The second largest source of income Manifest has is chocolates and drinks sales. This scales pretty linearly with number of attendees. (And with the lack of CFA & SES providing alternate food sources this year, it's probably a bit bigger than a linear scale from last year) Given that, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Manifest have an end-of-financial-year retained earnings approaching five figures.

The questions have to be asked: What the hell went so wrong with the budgeting process that Manifest charged such high entry but delivered so little event for the money? Were Manifest going to fly the Eminence Orchestra down and put them up for the weekend, and then it fell through? Did Manifest have voice actors lined up and the pulled out? Some famous director / mangaka from Japan? What was being planned the justified such high prices and why did it not happen?

Or, as I have a strong reason to believe, was the membership price basically plucked out of thin air with no budgeting or financial modelling at all?

I think the real problem this presents is no longer one of hypocrisy and greed but potential action brought against Manifest by somebody. It's been claimed that the problems with screenings were that the committee didn't want to get sued or fined. The screenings haven't presented nearly the risk that Manifest's financial management now does. Even a big fan-run con isn't worth suing over showing unlicensed anime, but an organisation with deep pockets run largely by unprofessional kids is worth taking a joust at. By creating such huge year-over-year retained earnings Manifest has made itself quite a tempting, low-hanging target. Historically it hasn't been worth it, but I don't think that's the case any more.

I had a average experience with rego personally. (Not good, not bad) On one hand my line ride was less than 15 minutes long (Friday, around 3:00PM), on the other I sent off my rego on the day mail-in rego opened. I didn't hear anything for a month. I finally gave up waiting and started chasing it up. It turns out my rego was sitting about unprocessed (because I hadn't provided a mobile phone number) but the rego co-ord hadn't bothered to fire off an email to me to clear things up. So from my personal experience the organisation was not good. It seems that the number of complaints in the rego forums is far greater than scaling from previous years or from similar sized cons would warrant so this may not just be me having bad luck. I'm reluctant, though, to outright say pre-reg was incompetently handled from just the number of complaints it got without trying to do more analytical statistics.

For all that my rego pick up was painless, I'm astonished that so little has changed from last year. The lines were probably the most vehemently complained-about aspect of last year. There were a couple of ways to fix this but they boiled down to two solutions: post stuff out to attendees to get them out of the line or change rego to allow much greater parallelism of processing.

Well, nothing was posted out to attendees. The concern here was that passes could get lost in the mail. It's almost certain that a handful of membership badges would disappear in the mail given how many members Manifest has. But honestly, how is that a compelling argument? Australia Post statistics state that about 98.5% of mail is delivered no more than one day late. Even if we're extraordinarily mean and count all mail delivered more than a day late as "lost" then Manifest rego would have to deal with 50-100 pre-regers on the day needing badges. Surely it'd be better to deal with 100 people needing badges than with a line of 3500 pre-regers needing badges?

The other option, and one Manifest seemed it was aiming for this year was to make things happen in parallel. Most members this year had unnamed badges. The idea was that you could then have a line and send people to one of many desks to pick up their badge and showbag. What we had instead was a doubly serial system: Not only where there only one or two tables working each line, but both lines fed into a single station for the showbags. This was the big problem with registration this year and why some enjoyed the line ride for more than four hours. Registrations were still being processed basically one at a time. There was only one computer at the pre-reg table and every pre-reg had to have its number typed in.

There are so many obvious, easy things that could have been done to fix the rego problems from last year. The most astonishing thing is that almost nothing was done.

Registration is a hard job. The registration team deserves some respect for that. But registration has been a hard job for many years. Registration seemed to have all the resources it needed. It had multiple co-ordinators, it had the money to dump credit card processing off to an outside organisation and all the committee was aware of its importance. It was still poorly run.



Notes on the graph: 2008 Pre-reg numbers were given to me by one of the Registration co-ords on the day and were described as "very rough". The total is taken from a forum post, and the OTD is taken as the difference. I wouldn't take this statistics as gospel until better analysis has been done. The prediction is based on the previous two years' data.

The number of attendees rego had to deal with was significantly lower than would have been predicted. Looking at previous years, even with little or no advertising for the event registration should have been prepared for around 6000. It got 4800. It was explained that some of this is that Manifest hit their venue limit. This didn't happen until late on Saturday, though so I don't think it has had a significant effect. 2004 had venue limits imposed as early as noon, and the overall dip is much smaller than what appears to have happened this year.

Whatever the reason for the shortfall, Manifest registration had to deal with many fewer attendees than it should have been set up for, so it should have gone utterly smoothly on the day. It's even more incredible that it all went so slowly. One person reported waiting five hours in line. The registration team this year was simply much worse at their job than it has been in previous years.

Finally, Manifest dropped syndicate registration this year. I don't buy the reasoning that it would be too much effort to work with syndicates - it is a little work, but it's not something I've heard rego co-ords complain about before. I don't buy the reason that it would have been too hard to work on the day. If it really were that much of a concern the badges could just have been posted out to the syndicate leaders. Both the special named badges and the under-16 registration with toughened the supervision rules created much, much greater levels of complication on the day than syndicates used to.

It was also such a pity to drop syndicates given the theme. Manifest could have done something really awesome like commissioned several artists to draw Mafia and Yakuza Peppa-chans, then made a special badge for each syndicate. Badges wouldn't have to be named or anything and all syndicate registrations are full weekend so they could all have the same background colour. You don't have to know the exact numbers of syndicates and syndicate members to commission the artists and include the badges in the manufacturing run. You just guess conservatively. You can re-used commissioned art next year and extra badges have a lot of use and aren't expensive. If you get the clubs in early you can have them run their own competitions or commission their own artists for some of the work. They will love you for what amount to club-specific badges.

And you have to remember syndicate registration was about the anime clubs and keeping Manifest in their reasonable graces. Already I've been hearing from multiple pissed off clubs about Manfiest. The clubs used to be an excellent source of organisational talent for MOC but the more MOC pisses them off, the more that dries up. Even without my crazy syndicate-specific badge fantasies, I don't think it was in Manifest's interest to drop syndicate rego.

Theme

Manifest had a really great theme this year. Mafia vs. Yakuza.

As a theme it's brilliant. It has a wonderful Japanese flavour and (given Melbourne is the organised crime capitol of Australia) a very Melbourne flavour. It's colourful and rich. The conflict adds drama almost as good as privates vs ninja. It's even a cheeky nod to some internal committee stuff.

The theme could be used in a huge number of ways to enhance the convention. You could do a crime-themed theatre of anime, mafia and yakuza prizes for the cosplay, mafia and yakuza themed art comps, fanfic comps. The website could have been themed, the cosplay chess could have been themed and the programme book could have been themed. Volunteers could have been given either mafia-style hats or yakuza tats.

And yet almost nothing was done with the theme. It was utterly and completely wasted. There was a bit of Peppa-chan art on the badges and a question in the Trivia but that was about it. I think it's telling that when the AI-Con people got up to pimp their convention at the closing ceremony one of the ways they ribbed Manifest was that they actually use their theme in their events.

Volunteers

From the outset the running of volunteers seemed much better this year, with full itemisation of volunteer rewards laid out, including entry refund. That's a high standard, and one that should be comended. The organisers seemed competent and quick to respond to questions people had.

Jen and I registered ourselves on Friday. Neither of us planned to be volunteers, but we'd been helping Alan set up tech and he insisted that we go sign up to get volunteer rewards.

I didn't expect a parade as a result of signing up as a volunteer. I didn't even expect gratitude - the rewards system was quite generous and that, objectively, should be more than enough. Of the three or four times we were in the volunteers room, at times ranging from mid-Friday when we signed up to late-Sunday before we bumped out, it was never a place I wanted to be. I wouldn't call the volunteers co-ord uncivil, but I certainly wouldn't call him welcomming. He just didn't seem to want us there.

Actually, you know what the problem was? There was no concern about us as volunteers. He didn't care to know what we'd been doing, how much work we'd been given, if we were feeling dehydrated, tired or at all abused. That was the problem. I don't want the volunteers co-ord to be lovey-dovey or overly motherly, but you must have a basic level of interest in if your volunteers are okay and he didn't want to know about it.

I suppose there's an outside chance that it just happened that right before we walked into the room each time something had happened to make him utterly perturbed at the universe, but nothing about the experience of volunteering made me want to come back the next year and do it again. Jen and I each did our ~10 hours work, got our allotted reward and were glad to be done with it.

Also, I'm not happy that Manifest is still using under-age volunteers. The toughened rules for supervision meant that they had to be with their guardian at all times which helped a little, but I still don't think it's a good idea. As I complained two years ago when Manifest started doing it, it doesn't take much for a volunteer to get in over their head. It only takes a volunteers co-ord to be a little less than perfect for a child volunteer to slip through the gaps and be put in a position where they are overworked or put in a situation they cannot handle. Remember that even adult volunteers have fainted or been hospitalised by events smaller and less stressful than Manifest is now. The consequences can be dire. It's an arbitrary distinction that Manifest made when it said under-15s are not physically strong enough or mentally mature enough to handle the responsibility, but it was one that basically reflects child labour laws. The ban on under-15 volunteers should be re-instated.

Schedule and Screenings

It's good to see Manifest back up to over 100 hours of anime after a precipitous drop from 2006 (~120 hours) to 2007 (~80 hours).

Unfortunately, there was a lot wrong with screenings this year. I'm not actually sure that Manifest is back up to >100 hours. because while that's what the schedules say, what was actually screened seemed to have only passing relation to the schedule. Moderately accurate timetables were stuck up at the door of each theatre, but this system was far from convenient or accurate.

The actual anime screened was very different this year. Very little of the schedule was new anime. Very little of it was stuff that hadn't been seen at Manifest before. Perhaps most bizarrely, very little of the anime shown was stuff that you couldn't just go buy at your local JB Hi-Fi.

Somewhere around 80% of the schedule was old, licensed and widely released stuff. In one rather fell swoop Manifest's screenings went from showing a sampling of the newest anime to spooling off Madman's back catalogue. I'm trying to think of a way to wrap my head around it. Anime is the sine qua non of a convention and while it was still there, it had been severely lame-ified. It's like the Melbourne International Film Festival suddenly announced that they were only going to show Holywood blockbusters. None of which would be more recent than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It'd still be a film festival, it'd just be utterly missing the point.

There may be good reasons for what happened this year. That doesn't make the screenings any less lame, though. I think that Manifest erred too far to the side of caution out of irrational paranoia and didn't consider its new screening policy the loss it is. If there had been any sign that the OFLC was looking into anime conventions, or rights holders were getting twitchy about something Manifest and many other conventions have been doing for years then maybe it would have been wise for Manifest to start the process of getting some of its stuff classified by the OFLC. It should have been something ramped up to, with years where Manifest introduced anime they have managed to get rated alongside the new anime. Trying to "go legit" all at once didn't do anybody any good.

One, very minor advantage that showing Madman releases gave was that the screenings were all DVD-quality. I know they were all DVDs because Manifest showed the dubs. Dubs versus subs is an old argument that has merit o both sides, but the general sentiment was very anti-dub. I personally agree and wonder why, when showing from DVDs, Manifest chose dubs. Or at least why it wasn't put to a quick vote at the start of each screening.

Finally, the marathon theatre got through three runs of Cowboy Bebop. The last two were a misuse of the theatre time - other anime should have been scheduled instead of giving us repeats.

Cosplay

I didn't manage to see the FRUiTS cosplay on Friday which was a bit of a disappointment to me as I enjoyed it last year. I also didn't see the Sunday cosplay because we were out doing other things. Jen and I did sit in for Saturday.

The event was taking a while to start. Brad mentioned they were having "technical problems" with the mics - I'm not sure where Alan was at this stage, but the "technical problem" was that the mics were not turned on.

Just before the event started, a photographer came up and asked for our seats in exchange for his as he wanted a higher spot to shoot over the judges. Jen and I didn't mind and so found ourselves down in the press gallery. Sorry to Flipper who I pestered about her hat not realising that the photographers had been already been doing so and that she was dealing with a blood nose.

The cosplay event went much better than the year before. Tannie should be commended for running a smooth event. The pre-judging helped. The MCs were pretty good and while they did lose their way now and then but always knew they were off the track and pulled it back.

The cosplay feed this year used a third type of system. When I did it I ran 75Ω coax and used an RF amp. This worked moderately well, but required stringing cable across the venue. Last year Daniel used digital streaming over the uni network and this worked fantastically. This year the person in charge of it used coax and ran composite video. This had all the disadvantages of the cable I ran and a few more - two wires had to be run (one for video and one for mono audio) and the signal was badly degraded over such a length. Jen and I were sitting down on Sunday in PLT but walked out because the quality was so terrible. This is a pity because the camera was a much better camera than previous years, and the position allowed for a better view.

Programme Book

There was no programme book provided on Friday or Saturday. On Sunday we could go pick up on from a table where they were hastily being stapled together. And they were not good. Shockingly bad, actually. The programme book was missing a huge range of things. Even of the parts that were there, there were pages missing (try finding the screening description for anything starting with S)

The schedule was hard to read. Last year I complained that there was inconsistent naming of various theatres (some theatres had Manifest names, like "Main Events" and some had Melbourne Uni names like "PLT") This year Manifest took it a step further and not only used a variety of naming on their schedules, but then used different names for theatres on their maps. (What was "Theatre E" in the schedule, for example, was "MA15+" on the map.) I still have no idea where "North Court" is.

Weather

Melbourne put on beautiful weather for the event. It was a bit hot down in various theatres, which made running around pulling cable etc sweaty work. Manifest provided a stack of free bottles of water for volunteers and random cosplayers etc. I was very glad of this. It's a responsible thing to do. I'm pretty sure it's been done in previous years but never to the level of availability the water was this year.

Photo Booth

Neil's photo booth was an excellent addition to the convention. He was perhaps a bit lonely tucked away in the Eco&Comm basement and so didn't quite get the traffic he should have, but it's an excellent service. I'd probably have liked to see him in one of the rooms outside at ground level, probably swapping him for the Drawing room. It would have made more sense and made better use of the space for all the OzTaku drawing classes to have been down near the art show.

Rules and Regulations

I think it's telling that when the AI-Con folks got up to do their spiel at the closing ceremony they ribbed Manifest for all its rules and restrictions. The best comedy is the truth and this case it's fair to point out Manifet went rule-crazy this year.

The previous year's code of conduct banned weapons except where they were cosplay weapons. This year all weapons were banned outright and then a poorly-defined exception for cosplay "props" was thrown together. There's a long thread on the forums about what is okay and what isn't, and basically nothing was okay, not even basic household items. They banned badminton bats, among other things. The weapons policy went to a conservative extreme that benefited nobody.

The reason given was an irrational interpretation of Victorian law. None of the Manifest committee are lawyers in this field or consulted one and there was no suggestion that police have been traipsing around anime conventions finding badminton bats threatening and arresting people. The new policy was an utter over-reaction. Even if police were arresting cosplayers at conventions, that's between the police and the cosplayer. Manifest should be requiring all attendees to be obeying the law, but it should not be trying to make the judgement of what is and what isn't illegal.

There was a dress code for Manifest this year. I'm not quite sure where any of that came from - it seems to have no purpose other than to restrict the range a cosplayer can choose from. Manifest volunteers were this year required to make judgements about what is too scantily clad and what isn't. There weren't any guidelines published for this, and I couldn't find anything in the University of Melbourne's rules that set dress codes except in places like laboratories. Personally I think anyone willing to bare skin in Melbourne's climate for the sake of cosplay deserves more than a little respect.

I know there are some Melbourne Uni students who walk around barefoot (and listen to the Dave Mathews band, but that's beside the point) so I wonder where Manifest's sudden insistence for shoes comes from.

Other new rules and regulations include a privacy policy which is a very nice addition. Manifest has had pretty lax data security in the past. The policy doesn't automatically translate to better treatment of sensitive data, but it is a very important step in the right direction.

Traders

Traders were in the union building again. It's not nearly as a good a space as Wilson's hall, but of the spaces Manifest could get it's probably the most suitable.

It was cramped and very busy. Oddly, the stairs directly outside were made one way (which was good) but they were made an exit only, which was not the better of the two options. It would have been much safer to have it as an entrance rather than an exit. that also would have meant more logical flow up out of traders to Merchandise and Fan Traders.

The range of traders and fan traders wasn't quite as good as it was last year, but I do think it was better than average.

I bought Hollow Fields 2 early on Saturday, finding what I think may have been the only copy in the entire hall. I spent a little bit of money at fan traders, but I really only had coins left in my pocket at that stage.

Fan Traders were in a good space this year. Again I thought the range of stuff available was a little worse than last year but still above Manifest's average.

AMVs and Iron Chef

Mark ran solid AMV and Iron Chef events. Sound quality was down a bit as he wasn't patched into the AV system, instead using the theatre system. I missed a lot of the AMVs because I was helping set up tech. I saw the winners presented on Sunday. Jen and I both thought the comedy winner lacked comedy.

Sorrell did a fantastic Iron Chef voice for judging. The Iron Chef videos all were utterly amazing for the time contestants had to do them.

Trivia

This Manifest was the first time I'd participated in the Trivia. Along with the Cosplay and AMV stuff, this was a really solid and well-run event. Jen and I were on a table witha bunch of South Australians folk. Were were in with a chance until the last round, whereupon we'd dropped to fifth place. I really enjoyed the trivia event.

AV Tech

I didn't agree with some of the decisions Alan made (setting up lights during AMVs, desk down the front again) but it was reasonably well run. In previous years tech has had a handful of people reasonably versed in the basics to help set up. Mark, Sorrell, Dan, and the few random others were elsewhere.

Alan had volunteers, but he wasn't terribly good at managing them. He didn't really know how to distribute jobs to his volunteers, so they often sat about doing not much.

Events could have been much better if event heads had been more clear to Alan what the needed and wanted. I think people assumed events tech would be like a member of committee, but Alan expected a much greater level of professionalism for Manifest and he didn't get it, so he was left guessing.

There wasn't enough time to set things up so we were putting things together during events. There wasn't enough time allocated to tear things down so the lights and sound were switched off and taken apart during the Karaoke on Sunday night - exactly the sort of event that all the lighting and sound was for. Karaoke was stuck trying to use the lecture theatre system, and it was far from ideal.

All Up

Wow, that was long. And an awful lot of it was negative. I try to be comprehensive with these reviews, and while there were some quite solid and enjoyable parts of Manifest, there were a whole lot of problems. There were things I'd planned on seeing / doing that I basically missed for lack of time (like the panels - some of those looked like they would have been really good) and those aren't commented on.

I don't want this review to make it sound like I didn't enjoy the weekend. I really did, but much of this review is written to be impersonal event critique and my personal enjoyment of the weekend just doesn't come through.

I do feel ripped off. The price was too high for what we got, and decisions were made in regards to screenings, weapons and registration that traded fun for satisfying paranoia.