Hey folks, me again!

As most of you should know, if you've been keeping up with the latest news, yesterday was the 31st Vancouver Sci-Fi/Fantasy Convention; also known as V-Con 31. For a quick recap of what this means to Into The Black, 7 of us were invited to do a 1 hour panel. The seven included me, Damien (the 2/3 creators), Troy (Cap'n), Aaron (Call), Miranda (Sera), Jason (Sammy) and Katie (The Boss & make-up artist). The general events happened as such:

We strolled into a decent sized conference room at 3pm and sat along the panel table. A projector and screen were already set up for videos so Damien got right to it and tried to get the damn thing running. Unfortunately, today was a lucky day for Damien (he had problems with the videos earlier and then his car died) so to make things even luckier he couldn't get the damn thing to work properly! So to stall for time I went ahead and started things up by introduce myself and Into The Black. After my self-indulgent speech I handed things off to the cast and they, as expected, introduced themselves. Then we just started talking about whatever until tech support could get the thing working. It was pretty informal, but fun nevertheless.

I should also mention at this point that the room was well filled to about 75-80% capacity, so a not bad showing. After tech support got the projector working we then showed actual photage for the very first time to anyone outside ITB. Of course the majority of ITB hadn't seen the trailer either so it was a nice treat. But, as luck is always on our side the computer playing the video was not powerful enough to play it properly so there were sound glitches everywhich way. Still good though.

After the trailer (which is approximately 2 minutes) we opened the floor to Q&A. It was nice to have people raise their hands and say things like, "I just wanna say how thankful I am that you guys exist and how much I appreciate what you are doing, etc.) It was also nice to see that people were genuinely interested in ITB. People asked pretty specific questions for which we had detailed answers for so I think they appreciated that.

Later we showed our opening credit sequence with full song and music composed and sung by Damien. We then answered more questions and soon after the panel came to a close. We had autograph cards for all the cast members which they autographed for folk. People still wanted to know more so we ended up moving the "after-panel" talks outside. It was great to meet people who wanted to help out in anyway they could. Really appreciate that. One of our more interesting offers was by the sci-fi author Don DeBrandt/Cortez (who, interestingly enough, was offered to write for the Firefly novels). He offered to look over scripts and stories to help give them polish, but more importantly he offered his services as a narrative writer for any future episodes.

All in all, a good day for Into The Black. We'll try to get the videos we showed at the panel online for all to see as soon as we can. Cheers!

-Eric