Behind-The-Scenes of Video Production at Dragon Con and MomoCon with Dimitri Tarassenko

Gene Liverman: 0:04

Hello everyone and welcome to the Volunteer Technologist podcast. Here we take a look at the different ways that people who are technically inclined volunteer outside of their primary job. Today I'm joined by Dimitri Tarassenko. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Gene, thank you very much I appreciate you taking the time to join me. I was wondering if you would take a brief moment to introduce yourself and maybe give us an idea of what we're going to talk about today.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 0:31

Thank you. First of all. That's my first time being on any podcast ever. I appreciate the invite. I am a software engineer by training and by my main profession. I'm at the what I would call the pinnacle of my career right now, because it's been a while. I've been in the industry for quite a bit. At different points in my life I did various volunteer jobs that were technology related. The one that Gene got interested in was the volunteering work that I do for two conventions in Atlanta area the Dragon Con and the MomoCon. That's how our conversation got started. That's, I think, what we're going to talk about today.

Gene Liverman: 1:15

Yeah, that does sound pretty interesting. Just to kind of set the stage, can you give me the layman's version of what those conferences are and what kind of scale they are?

Dimitri Tarassenko: 1:25

They're called multi-genre pop culture conventions. Both of them Dragon Con is the larger. one of the two shows that I volunteer for. This is a think of Comic-Con on a slightly smaller scale. You get 85,000 people, not 120,000 people. It happens yearly in Atlanta during the Labor Day weekend. This is around first weekend of September.

Gene Liverman: 1:55

It's a pretty good size conference.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 1:59

If you've ever been to Atlanta downtown during that time, you probably know what I'm talking about, because we basically take over the downtown. It's multi-genre, so it means that people from different fandoms and people who are interested in different things about pop culture gather together and spend wonderful five days partying and exchanging ideas and listening to people in the industry and whatnot. Dragon Con is a little bit more geared towards literature, fan fiction, board gaming and television. Momocon is a smaller convention that happens at the Georgia World Congress Center, not the five hotels that the Dragon Con is at. It's approximately half the size, maybe a little bit bigger. That is catering to a little bit younger crowd. This is more focused on the animation, primarily Japanese animation and gaming. It's in video games and things of that nature.

Gene Liverman: 3:04

Cool. What is it that you're doing for Dragon Con? Is it just a team of you, or are there a whole bunch of people? What's that? Look like that's a pretty big conference. I imagine there's a lot of tech behind the scenes going on there.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 3:20

That's exactly right, Gene. That is one thing that sets the Dragon Con apart from similar events that might happen in New York or San Diego that you might have heard of. The Comic Con conventions are run by a commercial organization and most people who make these huge things happen are hired professionals. Dragon Con is almost entirely volunteer run. We're talking about a volunteer organization that is 2,000 people. Most of these 2,000 contribute about 20, 25 hours of their time during the convention doing certain things. There are people who spend more time doing this and there are people who work on this year-round preparing for different things. That is much smaller group, but this is a very closed-knit community that overlaps with other conventions that some of the same people are doing as any organization of that size. It's got its own structure. It's got management structure. It's got different divisions that are focused on different tasks. If you're a low-enforcement officer and you want to volunteer for Dragon Con, there is the entire safety department that deals with these issues. If you're a doctor, there's a place for that. If you're an advertising professional, there is a marketing division. Once a year it becomes a very big corporate structure with all the ins and outs of it, including the IT department and similar things. My place in that organization is in the video processing and streaming department. The part of technology that I help with is the streaming presence for both conventions and that is kind of buried in what's called the Operations Group, which is a group of volunteers that deal with audiovisual aspects of technology there. So this is where you go which an event or you go to see a panel of some sort and volunteers are running the audio boards and volunteers are running the cameras there that you see basically the picture on the larger projection screens. Because some of these panels are for 1,000 to 2,000 people. It becomes a media operation if it's sort with a small TV production that might be anywhere from two to a four-camera shoot, with sort of larger audio boards, a bunch of mics in it and everything else. And a lot of these events are being first of all streamed. So there's a kind of a streaming technology component to it and even a bigger portion of that gets recorded and then is used in social presence for these conventions and goes on YouTube for people who may not have been able to attend the convention or a particular event, like if you wanted to get into one of two panels that was going at the same time and you happen to have your favorite actors in both of them. You go to one and then you watch another one on YouTube or Dragon Con TV, as it may, right. So Dragon Con is a larger convention. It has its own TV channel that we kind of stand up on Wednesday before the convention starts and we broadcast for five to six days, all the way until Monday. It is a 24-7 TV station for all intents and purposes. That has its own kind of ad breaks. It has a lot of live events when we broadcast live panels and the Dragon Con parade. That happens on Saturday morning when the Atlanta Peachtree Street is shut down for thousands of people that demonstrate their cosplay. There are concerts. There's a bunch of live events that go on that constitute most of this TV channel experience, and there's a news division that goes and shoots interviews. So think of if you had a small 80,000 people town that appeared out of nowhere for five days and that town had a TV station. A lot of small towns like that have their own TV station. So I'm working at a TV station that appears for five days every year and then disappears right. And I run the technology group that basically is doing what's called in the industry master control, which is the operation that takes live feeds and pre-recorded content and dissembles it all into a sort of a linear channel, a channel of television that people watch. And then you know this is not just going to streaming. If you're staying at one of the convention hotels in downtown Atlanta, you get that channel on your in-room cable TV. So you, you know it has become a thing because it's been going on for 20 years now. So this is the Dragon Con. TV is part of the convention experience for a lot of people who come year after year after year. Last year sorry, the year before last was our 20th anniversary and we did a lot of graphics and showed a lot of content that was produced almost 20 years ago. So I had some three by four interlaced videos to take care of it was yeah, it was its own kind of interesting thing, but that's what it is. With Dragon Con, MomoCon is kind of a smaller operation that is very Twitch-centric. It's more geared towards kind of streaming audience and because a lot of this is about gaming, their primary platform is Twitch. So for me it's a simpler operation that is using a lot of the same technology we used during Dragon Con. But what's important is you know that kind of core volunteer group that makes it all happen and at one convention 70 to 80% of the people in the same group are doing other conventions as well. So over time, you know, I used to do Dragon Con only and then I realized that I missed some of the friends that I would only see once a year. I decided to go and see them twice a year, even though you know MomoCon crowd is a lot younger than I am and you know I stick out there as one of the few people with gray hair. But it's okay, it's a lot of fun nonetheless.

Gene Liverman: 10:01

Yeah, it's kind of hard to wrap my mind around a 2000-person volunteer organization, given that the first software company I worked for was 10 years old and had 500 people in the whole company and we were a global company. We got bought by another global company and the entire company, I think, barely didn't even make it all the way to 2000 people, and I think the company that we're working for today is 250-ish people. That's true. so like just thinking about that. It's like okay, got entire companies, including some that are like 10 and 15 years old or more and we're talking two to four times the size of those in a volunteer force to run just the volunteer side of the conference. That's just kind of, for a scale perspective, that's just kind of amazing.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 10:52

You're exactly right. That's a unique thing. First of all, they had a little bit of time because Dragon Con is going to be 37 years old next time. It is run now by a daughter of one of the founders, so he's still around, but he's retired and he's his daughter, Rachel Reeves R, runs it now. So I work alongside some of the people whose parents kind of started this and now they are the volunteers.

Gene Liverman: 11:26

That's really cool.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 11:27

It's really cool because there's a lot of people who stuck along for that long. We have several volunteer meetings or orientation meetings that are usually happening in the spring, which is where we do kind of our recruitment. If you want to be a volunteer for Dragon Con, you show up to one of those. You go and talk to people and they tell you what jobs are available and you try to figure out your place in there, but it's usually a gathering of a bunch of people you haven't seen for half a year. One of the things that the organization is doing during this time is in your anniversary years you get a pin. So I got my five-year pin and then there's a whole part of the ceremony that actually takes a long time when they're distributing these pins. So there's like a five-year pin, there's a 10-year pin. I have a friend that I work with that's got a 25-year pin. Wow, a 25-year pin a couple of years ago, so it would be his 27th or so. He's a really cool guy. People tend to stick for quite a while and sometimes they take breaks because they move away, can't attend this and that. The COVID year was a very different experience for everybody, of course, because it all went virtual. There was nothing happening, and then the two years that it took the convention to recover from COVID. But I attribute it to the fact that I'm probably in the minority that ends up doing things for Dragon Con that are close to their day job. And this is not even 100%, because I'm not a master control room operator or a video engineer my day job. I'm a software engineer that just happens to design and write software for television. So I know these processes, but I know them not because this is my day job. I know them because my day job is creating tools for people that work in this industry.

Gene Liverman: 13:37

So what is it that a normal round of volunteering at Dragon Con actually has you doing?

Dimitri Tarassenko: 13:45

I mainly train people to do their job, basically to do the quality control for the video that they're taking in. I pick technologies that we're using, so the streaming services and various pieces of equipment sometimes that are used in the process. I create kind of operational procedure for the people that actually do the job and then I'm around answering questions and helping them if they have any problems. It sounds like I'm not doing much during the convention, but I'm usually 35 to 40,000 steps on my watch every day during that, because you're running from sort of one place to another and there's a lot of stuff happening. So it's pretty straining physically as well. But that's my job Most of the volunteers, depending on what you do for the operation. If you're working in kind of television or broadcast, as we call it, there are jobs where people show up and do camera work. People show up and do production switcher work, where they kind of switch in between the cameras and graphics and create this experience that you see on the what's called in-venue projection screen, the larger screen that you see in some of these panels. There's audio work, where you work with microphones and audio boards and watch that. So think of a media production company, right? Just not unlike a division of the company that you and I work for that does production for sports, except, like this one is think of it's doing production for an event. One of the events happens to be the parade, when we actually this year was pretty cool because we did get a license from Atlanta Police Department to operate a drone during the parade, so we had one of our guys fly the drone and one of our cameras was the drone feed from up top. We had some complaints about that, because one of the floats in the parade that's very popular is this huge desert ship manned by Jawas in the Star Wars, and there are a group of people who dress up like Jawas, with their brown suits and everything, and this thing looks awesome because it looks just like a Star Wars ship. And we actually aired a shot of that contraption from up above and it was obvious to everybody that they basically took a school bus and kind of framed it with panels on the outside and up until now nobody knew what was inside this thing. So that was interesting. But it's like people running around with mobile cameras they're not always mounted, so you get to play television engineer and you get to play television operator for a day. Like I said, most of the people that I work with they're sort of, like myself, intentionally related to this, or they went through film school but ended up working and doing something else. Or they wanted to go to film school but, you know, went and did something else. But it creates this kind of environment where you can go and try doing something that you don't normally do in your day life, or for about five days, and a lot of people find it very, very attractive, attractive enough to I don't know, spend $1,000 on a hotel to stay there or spend another thousand to fly in and out, because it's not just local people, it's not just Southeast. I had volunteers who flew down from St Paul, for example. Right One of the ladies that worked in my division. She had a friend here who told her about this. She was like, yeah, I'm going to fly in, and it's a very decent portion of both attendees and volunteers that do that.

Gene Liverman: 17:33

How many simultaneous, different broadcasts would you say, that are running during a different day of the conference, and I think of a broadcast as being like a given presentation, or basically a given set of cameras that are focused on a common subject.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 17:49

So during Dragon we do production where there's a camera switching in four or five different rooms. There are smaller rooms where it's just recording and sometimes it's just a single camera and we usually pick the most interesting event out of these where we can get the signal, depending on the year and the agreement with the hotel. It's usually we get two or three different sources, so I get a pick of which event to pick, but it's really not my pick. We kind of compile the schedule ahead of time, trying to figure out, because there are some aspects where, if we have, for example, a very interesting panel but there is an actor from BBC, right, BBC has streaming rights for everything that these guys do, so we can't follow that, we follow something else. But it's generally that setup. I get a pick from two, three different sources, depending on what's going on, which are live and sometimes nothing is that interesting. Or we have this BBC blackout and we play kind of pre-recorded material that might have happened at the other time. But it's usually anywhere from four to five to six rooms that have this setup and the ones that don't broadcast live or don't stream they usually record things and that is used later in the library that builds up at Dragon a Con TV. Shameless Plug, where we actually sell streaming subscriptions to people, which is 10 bucks a year, gets you access to all the live content during the convention, and then the library of content that was accumulated, and we usually produce about 100 plus hours of content every year that goes into that library and then a lot of people try to catch up on the events that they missed that way. When I trade people on Master Control and kind of the jobs that we have them do at Dragon n Con TV, I usually tell them well, if you're asking yourself how many people are watching because this is not Twitch you don't see a counter, right, yeah, of how many people are watching your feed. Think of it this way you've got about two and a half thousand rooms where this is going into. You've got anywhere from 50 to 500 people who are streaming it online. So think in terms of, like, you're showing it to a couple of hundred people. If it's a very popular panel, if it's somebody from like Star Trek, for example, like we usually have a few very kind of well-known personalities, every year this grows to a couple of thousand, right?

Gene Liverman: 20:40

Yeah.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 20:41

If you're doing it in the middle of the night, people are usually partying Like they have your content in the room, but that's a background kind of noise to whatever they're doing. But that's that. MomoCon is kind of done differently, because we do four simultaneous live streams to Twitch from different panels and we do a fifth one, which is sort of a highlights, where we pick the one that's most interesting and that one stays on for. You know, 24-7, right, 24 are kind of event-based, where they're being started and stopped as things are happening in. They call main rooms or larger rooms that, usually things that hold 700-plus people in terms of audience size, or the ones that we use for streaming.

Gene Liverman: 21:27

You had mentioned. Obviously the conferences are very different in size and MomoCon does a little more focus on the live streaming. How is the work you have to do and the technology stack, or the equipment that gets used and processes that get used? How are those different between, or the same between, the two conferences?

Dimitri Tarassenko: 21:47

There's a lot of overuse. They actually share equipment and I don't know organizationally how that happens, but a lot of equipment that's owned by MomoCon technically is used by Dragon and vice versa in a lot of ways, because it's a lot of the same people are doing both things. We finally got it to a point three years ago when we agreed on the video format, because Dragon was 720p and MomoCon was 1080p. Every six months we had to get all the equipment and switch all the cameras, switch all the production switches between that format and this format. We caught up and now it's 1080p, 59.94 throughout For both of them. That's kind of the house standard for both. There's a lot more synergy, a lot more reuse right now between the two worlds. It's mainly driven by the fact that I have the in-house hotel cable systems to target during Dragon, which is I have SDI workflows. I have all of this kind of a. It's extremely convoluted because some of these systems, some of the in-house cable systems that do cable TV in hotels, are very old as well. We're producing everything in nice and shiny 1080p and then a couple of hotels are still running standard definition setups. All of this crispy and colorful picture that I get from the parade, for example, with all of these colorful costumes and wonderful people. I squeeze it all the way back down to standard definition format for some of these. That's that set of complexities. MomoCon is a lot more in the digital world where it's just streaming. It goes straight to Twitch and I think this year we're going to do other platforms as well, which is going to be the first. That's probably the only difference. I need fewer people for MomoCon because it doesn't have its news division. People don't do editing. I'm not in that world. I don't edit, but I get the result of their work and that kind of stuff. That's basically the difference.

Gene Liverman: 24:01

You're talking about the news divisions. I meant to follow up on that a minute ago. Is it like studio news interviews or is it like people out in the conference doing just walked up interviews, or a little of both? What is that like?

Dimitri Tarassenko: 24:15

It's both. The news division is doing two live shows a day and those are more like studio shows with guests that are invited interviewers and they would show some excerpts that they might have shot about these people. The one that is done in the morning is called the Late Show. The joke has been some people stay out, so late, that the Late Show happens actually at 9am in the morning and that is the hardest one to do because you tend to stay out late and there's a lot to do after hours. The one at 6pm or 6pm news is called the Dragon Con Update, the DCU. The Dragon Con is usually done out of studio and the Late Show is done in one of the large panel rooms. It has audience and the other one is just a studio show. There is a whole group that does exactly what you're saying. They're running gun in it around the show, shooting interesting things and interviewing people on location and then bringing all that back and they have a post-production room where people sit and edit all of that material, do graphics, do post-production on this material. They usually produce anywhere from like a dozen to a dozen and a half of three five-minute segments every year, the ones that they shoot and produce Thursday and Friday. I get to use in that channel on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and about a third of them gets finished late in the game. But it's usually content that I can reuse next year and I just kind of rerun it from next year because some of these events are very interesting but they happen later in the convention. There is like robot battles, where people build robots that destroy each other and that kind of happens towards the end of the convention. There is what's called night fights, where people in armor are fighting each other with axes and swords and everything, and that thing goes for like five, six hours. It's a little bit of insanity going on for five days. It's sort of an easy environment to find interesting things to shoot for. This year, of course, it was the year of what they call the Barbieheimer. A lot of the photo shoots were 200 people who showed up in a Barbie costume or 40 guys who showed up dressed as Alan, that kind of stories. But it's a nice environment. That's usually kind of younger folks who oftentimes are either thinking about the profession or they are in film school at the time and that's kind of that crew that does it. But they do the scripts, they do shot lists and everything. There is anything that they do in post production. It's exactly what you would think of a small TV studio, just like I mentioned.

Gene Liverman: 27:36

I have to imagine that, aside from being a lot of fun, if you're even remotely interested in this kind of stuff, that this would also be a great way of doing some volunteer work and having a way to build your resume up a little bit to maybe get into the industry, Because I mean, there's plenty of evidence of what you do during those conferences, between what you're talking about with Dragon Con TV and the stuff that gets posted on YouTube or Twitch or what have you. Even people like me who don't go to the conferences have heard of these conferences for years and years and years, so there's some name recognition that goes with it too. No, it's a thing.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 28:12

It's a great networking opportunity to meet, maybe not the industry people, but at the very least the like-minded people who are in this. Atlanta has a growing television slash movie producing industry right now. So it's a lot easier right now to rent gear. It's a lot easier right now to find locations and find people like you. One of the things that the guys do is we have an entire year to produce some comedy content. It's usually parody skits. They would do a parody on advertising or a parody on some kind of popular music with different words and different video in the background. That all goes on, that kind of video channel. But every year we get about 15 to 20 submitted clips that we usually end up picking about a dozen to air. And there's several groups of people who produce this content during the year and this is like a full-fledged shoot and costume work and post-production and everything else. So there's a lot of overlap in people who do these things professionally or sometimes can do this stuff on the side. But it's a great networking opportunity for a lot of people. And then we have many people who kind of come and they, you know honestly it's not a very complex work. Like we. There's not any pre-qualification, that would kind of get you excluded from that group. But the first year that you come in there you might get a simpler job, knowing that you like. First of all there's training right, they were training and doing anything but, like, first year you're there. If you haven't ever done it, you might get a simpler job than if you've already done it. But a lot of people learn these skills that they then use and I've had these conversations because a lot of them are coming back and forth. So they, for example, went from volunteering at Dragon Con TV to doing more for their church, for example when they help with the streaming set up. A lot of churches are now doing it and we actually have quite a good number of folks who come and do this work because they're familiar from it, from you know, doing it for their church or trying to run their own YouTube channel, and it kind of exposes them to a little bit more, not professional technology, but at a prosumer level of how would you do a streaming set up if it was not just you with your webcam and screen?

Gene Liverman: 30:55

Oh, it's just a different scale.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 30:57

Right, it's a little bit higher scale, so it's not really a real TV station, but it's kind of very close to a real one that you can go and experience for a couple of days and see how things work. I would highly recommend it. If you're interested in television, right, if you're interested in broadcasting at all or in film, this is it's a nice way to kind of spend your convention, especially if you're going to a convention. That is, you know, which is how pretty much for everybody. You show up for the convention, you like it, and then you're kind of thinking, well, am I going to continue being a guest, right? Or am I going to help host this party, which is that was my progression, right? I was like you know, I like hosting parties. This is probably the biggest party that I get to host in my life, I would imagine. So you get 80,000 people showing up and you know you're making sure that they're all having a great time. That's very rewarding, not just in things that you learn, but in terms of that. You know it's meaningful for a lot of people, way more meaningful than you would think, because you know it creates a kind of a safe space for a lot of people, for you know, a few days that a lot of them may not have this safe space experience during the rest of their year, and that's that kind of shows, because you know how devoted they are to this, to this kind of culture and showing up every year and you know, being part of the organization that provides it to them is incredibly rewarding, I bet.

Gene Liverman: 32:43

So, to kind of wrap us up, if someone's listening to this and says you know that sounds pretty interesting, how would they go about finding out how to get involved? Or, you know, maybe looking at volunteering at one of these, one of these events.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 32:57

We had a joke. One of my volunteers had a really witty answer when we all started sharing stories how did you end up here? So his story was I clicked the wrong link. So the wrong link to click to end up there is either dragoncon. org or momocon. com. Both websites have a volunteer section that will point you out to more information of what's required from you and what are the benefits of volunteering and all that and the time to. I don't know, Gene lynne, this is going to come out, but the time to kind of sign up for volunteering for MomoCon, which is in Memorial Day weekend in May, is probably going to be in like a couple of weeks. So we usually start around New Year's with that one.

Gene Liverman: 33:47

Yeah, so this will be out by then. This one will be out December 1st of 2023.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 33:53

OK, ok. So this is like just keep track of that, because Dragon Con is probably going to start the recruiting process around February, march process. But then you sign up you will have to kind of provide your details because there's a like both organizations actually have a background check, because it's both kind of family friendly events with a lot of underage people they're trying to try.

Gene Liverman: 34:20

That's pretty standard fare for any decent sized conference. Yeah, at that level.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 34:24

At that level. That's kind of pretty standard. Like I said, a lot of the divisions in the organization that need help will be happy to take you if you have a specific set of skills and vice versa. If you would rather not use the specific set of skills that you have, then go try at doing something completely different. Like I joke with my director that the moment I get tired doing Dragon Con TV, I'm going to go and do the art show, which is like this is where you know, one of my favorite places at Dragon Con is the art show, where we've got a lot of visiting artists, and so one year I might do that. But bottom line is, everywhere where you need skills there's a training curriculum. It's not the first time these people are doing it right. This is kind of an established process.

Gene Liverman: 35:19

We'll be sharing link to both of those in the show notes to make it easier for people to find them also.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 35:24

Absolutely, I can give you those links and then in the application you just kind of loosely tell about yourself what you would like to be doing and pick a few divisions in the organization that you would want to work in, and that's kind of how it all starts. Now you have the wrong link to click.

Gene Liverman: 35:43

If someone was interested in reaching out to you to maybe follow up on something, is there a preferred way you would have them do that?

Dimitri Tarassenko: 35:50

Yeah, my email is dtarassenko @g d. dtarasse c at with 2 s's at gmail. com OK.

Gene Liverman: 35:55

And I'll be sharing that in the show notes too, to make it easy for people.

Dimitri Tarassenko: 35:58

Absolutely.

Gene Liverman: 36:00

Cool. Well, thank you very much for your time, Dimitri, and that's really interesting to hear about. It's just the idea of basically a city popping up for five days and having a volunteer organization that's bigger than any of the companies I've worked for is pretty fascinating. So that's pretty cool. Well, thank you again for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Gene. Before we go, I'd like to thank those of you who have boosted in support for the show. It is very much appreciated. This is a value for value podcast, which means I rely on listeners like yourself contributing back to fund it as such. I'll never charge you to listen, but producing and hosting it does cost money. If you got value from this episode, I ask that you contribute by sending a boost through a modern podcast app like Fountain or Castamatic, or via the Support the Show link in the show notes that are visible in your podcast app. You can also find the show notes and transcripts at volunteertechnologist. c om com. com. com. If you would like to come on the show or know someone I should reach out to about being on the show, please send me a message via one of the links at the bottom of the show notes. Thanks for listening.