I often get a migraine with aura (jaggly flashes in both eyes) when I’m under stress. Sure enough, after a weekend from Hell, I got a huge migraine Monday morning. Facing a whole day of brain smacking pain was not fun. Not to mention Damien, Ingrid, Phil and I had an important meeting Monday night to decide the fate of the Machinima Expo. Thankfully, we came together and made the  right choices. Ingrid, with our input, wrote a superb letter to the community, and we’ve severed our ties with Francois Decarie, the head of the Arcadia Games Festival,  who canceled our event without warning. 

I won’t go into the details here since Ingrid does it so well (you can read it at Machinplex3 blog and the Machinima-Expo blog today). I will say that we’ve learned a valuable lesson in festival/convention organization: get a signed contract and get the money first. We were simply too trusting in Francois. You just cannot assume in business and you have to work in a contingency plan if your primary agreement fails for some reason. 

We won’t make this mistake again. 

Business has always been a visit to bizarro land for me personally. Here in Hollywood it’s common for people to screw each other one day and be patting each other’s back the next. The idea of keeping ones word and having integrity in your dealings with people is often simply lip service. You end up feeling burned and paranoid. It’s too bad that despite the fact that Francois will not have the expense of the Expo to worry about, he’ll also lose our good will and possibly the good will of many in the machinima community. I certainly won’t have anything to do with him in the future. 

So who is really losing out in canceling the Expo? 

At this point, I’m glad that we are in control of our event. We will be creating a one-day event in Second Life where we will have the film festival and awards (probably not as fancy as we had planned though) and some kind of programming. This is certainly a much scaled down version of what we had planned, but at least we know we can depend on each other and it will be a lot of fun. 

Today, my migraine is gone. I’ve received several encouraging emails regarding the cancelation and we are starting to put together the virtual Expo. The world hasn’t exploded and my fears haven’t gotten the best of me. Funny how you get older and still have to learn the same lesson over and over again: things are never as bad as they seem. And the companion lesson: trust your friends. 

And I’d like to personally apologize to those who have been affected adversely by the Expo cancellation.