[Open Office — GIMP — Filezilla — carpentry tools — paint]

Steampunk is everywhere, so when a local convention claimed the genre for its own, I got in on the ground floor. As Experiential Director, I helped paying con-goers suspend their disbelief by decorating a hotel campus in a dimension-hopping steampunk theme. We placed huge framed maps of England and London and Raleigh, single-page pulp sheets of news and advertisements all over the hotel, and pasted transparent blueprints of blimps and rayguns and gearboxes all over the glass surfaces of the building.

We created a rumor mill, generating profile information for the characters in the ongoing storyline. Each persona had flaws, goals, and personal history, and provided entertainment for the con-goers in between scheduled events; a determined con-goer might even learn things about the characters that they don’t want to know. Staff and volunteers alone carried these around to spread rumors and truth; they went unseen by the general public.

I coordinated volunteer labor to arrive at my house, where wooden folding theatrical flats were constructed, painted, and decorated to lend a feel of an industrial modern age that might have been. I also made a few props, including a beacon used for the storyline, a trident that lacked only a water source to be an actual watergun–used as the prize for a contest–and a still-functional watergun, complete with appliqués and spinning gears.

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When it came time to create a trailer, I wrote the script based on characters and a scenario provided by the ConTemporal staff. I scoped out possible shoot locations, settling on a trainyard and neighboring brewery, and once we had that secured, we hired Rob Alan Underhill to film it. Before and during the shoot I acted as the stage manager, providing props, costuming, and makeup as needed–even designing stationery for one of the characters in the trailer.
The trailer ran online and on the hotel’s closed-circuit channel to all the rooms during the convention.