Still Trekkin’, still talkin’

This past weekend was the third annual (annual!) TrekTalks telethon, benefitting the Hollywood Food Coalition, and once again I was pushing the buttons that made the whole thing happen. And man, did a whole thing happen – just look at the numbers (as of a couple of days later when I’m writing this):

I could be mistaken, but I think that’s the best total yet for any of these events. That’s a lot of meals. That’s a good reason to sweat the details and add another day of live TV to the CV.

And things were plenty complicated beforehand – up until the SAG/AFTRA strike ended, we weren’t sure there was a show. A lot had to come together between October and January. Things changed rapidly. With that in mind, I didn’t spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel visually for the show – the persistent “temperature gauge” for donations had served us well in 2023, so why fix what isn’t broken?

Good-luck “beauty shot” of my workspace a couple of nights before the event. (The mood lighting almost hides the messy kitchen in the background and the fact that the rest of the place is packed up to move soon.)

Several segments were pre-recorded due to the availability of the guest panelists, which helped to make the necessary alternation between live and recorded events a bit smoother. Part of the challenge with doing the entire event via Zoom is that, to change from one panel of guests to another, I’m the one who has to move from breakout room to breakout room as expeditiously as possible. I’m pretty sure I’ve said it in the past, but as neat as it might seem to “meet” everyone involved, the unglamorous fact of the matter is that most of the conversations on my end are those of a stage manager: “we’re live in two minutes”, etc. There were a couple of times that the slowness of me sliding from one Zoom breakout room to the next got a little bit hairy, but because I always design my control layout with very easy-to-find “bailout” functions, at no point did anyone get to see a heaping helping of dead air.

The two-page primary control interface on a 32-key Elgato Streamdeck. As always, the single most important key in this layout is “fallback”. It got used this year.

The bottom row of keys is persistent on all pages of the control layout (to be honest, one of the real challenges preparing for each year’s event is designing a control layout that makes sense and won’t ever leave you in the lurch if things go south). Those keys bring up a “generic” screen to accommodate the necessary number of “heads” in a Zoom shot. (You don’t see me in these Zooms because I’m in “hide self view” mode. Things are actually very carefully set up to keep me from being seen or heard in TrekTalks…though even that deed didn’t go unpunished this year!) Perhaps more than in years past, the persistent row of “emergency” keys were life-savers this year.

The really cool innovation this year occurred to me about a week before the event. I’ve become very fond, since getting a new Android phone in 2023, of using Windows Phone Link. The thought occurred to me that I could screen-share my phone’s countdown timer through Windows Phone Link, and maybe I could feed that into OBS Studio on the computer running the “lobby” or the “green room” (as opposed to the computer that runs the event itself) to create an easily visible countdown timer during the event. No more time cues via Zoom chat – the numbers are right there on the screen. And I was able to test out an implementation of this with my phone timer, but with about 72 hours to go, I thought that perhaps I was overthinking things a bit.

Most of the panels were a set length – 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour – and it would actually be easier (and less dependent on the phone staying linked with Windows constantly) to pre-render those countdown clocks as small video files in VSDC, key them over my control room camera shot, and that way both moderators and hosts could see a great big clock counting down their time so there were no surprises when the moderator of a given discussion started wrapping things up. Furthermore, by pre-rendering the countdown clocks and setting them up in OBS, I could trigger countdowns of predetermined durations with the smaller 15-key Streamdeck on that PC, rather than having to fiddle with constantly setting the timer on my phone – in other words, “keep it simple, stupid.” Also, I kept the live donation tally as part of that display so all participants could see it and react to it in real time. (And boy, didn’t Todd Stashwick take that and run with it?)

Timer/control room camera controls on a 15-key Elgato Streamdeck running on the “lobby” machine. The “[duration] cam” keys would switch my webcam off or on, saving bandwidth but leaving the timer clearly visible. The “2 out” countdown was a 2-minute countdown to the beginning of a panel, after which the appropriate duration countdown could be punched up.

OBS Studio’s output was full-screened to the upper monitor of the lobby PC to take advantage of a functionality that I use in my own YouTube videos but haven’t previously used for TrekTalks: that upper monitor’s signal is also split off to a USB video ingest device on the PC that runs the actual show stream. That way, the countdown (and the control camera) could be seen by the moderator(s) and panelist(s) as my window in the Zoom. I normally use that video split solely for my long-running (I almost typed “long-suffering”) series of short videos in which I play old video games, but knowing that I could use that USB ingest as a Zoom “camera” input was a game changer. There were very, very few miscues where the time remaining until or in a panel were concerned.

Well, except for that one time.

The guests for the huge TNG/Picard panel arrive. They’re a talkative bunch!

The former stars of Star Trek: The Next Generation, gathered this year to reminisce about their experiences making season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, are a very chatty bunch. Any get-together is like a family reunion, because, well, they’re a family. But that meant nobody heard my time cues to the beginning of the panel, and I suspect no one was watching that two-minute countdown clock either. With my verbal countdown all the way to two seconds drowned out, I had to gesture wildly at the control room webcam to indicate to everyone YOU’RE ON. And they eventually noticed! They also kept talking after that one-hour timer hit zero, but, you know, who am I to tell the crew of the Enterprise they need to cut it short? We were just off-clock for the rest of the day. Sue me. For many years, the adventures of that crew in particular were a huge part of preventing me from giving in to some self-destructive urges in my youth. These people saved my life. They can talk as long as they damn well please, and I’m just going to occasionally glance at the clock and enjoy like everyone else. Should I have been a more assertive director? Maybe…but we’re all here to hear these people talk, and talk they did!

This almost demands the question: am I stretching myself too thin managing all this by myself with no backup? It’s just possible. I mean, I have PAs, but they’re pretty hands-off.

“PA” in this case translates to “purring assistant” – this is literally how they spent the event

Still, lazy production assistants or not, it’s hard to argue with that number that you see at the top of this blog. Not going to argue with that at all, except… it could still rise even higher. The QR code, the URL, everything still works. You can still donate to the cause that brought the prodigious amount of behind-the-scenes and on-screen talent together to make this event possible. The money doesn’t go to me. The money goes to provide meals for those who need them – and I have a feeling that, after a year of multiple labor actions that put Hollywood on pause for roughly half a year, the number of people needing that help is also a high number.

That’s why we did all this. (And when I say “we”, I’m really referring to all the folks behind the scenes who packed a huge amount of work on this into a compressed, shorter-than-usual period so I could sit here and push buttons on the day of.) So feel free to watch or rewatch what I did for one cold Saturday, and pitch in for a good cause.

As for the thing that came back to bite me: I set things up to avoid my face winding up on screen, or my voice being heard in the stream. I’m the director. You’re not supposed to hear me. But then John Billingsley asked us all to take a virtual bow and say a word right before the end credits. And because I had so carefully engineered everything from my wiring, signal routing, and my control setup to keep myself from ever being visible or audible…what I said wasn’t heard by anyone outside of the Zoom. (Technical diagnosis of what happened: if I’d been expecting that I’d need to be heard, I would’ve needed to add my mic input to OBS Studio and not just to Zoom. So to those watching at home, it seemed like I was muted.)

But the long and short of what I said – that wasn’t heard outside of the Zoom – was “thanks for letting me fly the ship.” And I mean that. I’m sitting in my living room with a somewhat motley, very-slowly-accumulated assemblage of equipment that gives me more production capability than most folks associate with having in their living rooms. It’s not a professional production studio. (Most such facilities lack the sheer number of cats I keep in mine, so really, I’d rather do this from my living room, thanks.) But I know how stuff works, and sometimes – as with the timer superimposed over my control room camera – even manage to surprise myself in finding uses for it. And putting that to use for a good cause? What could be better?

See you next year. And hey – if you’re planning an event like this, even if it’s not Star Trek related, you know where to find me. This is a year in which we need to make good things happen. There are a few corners of Star Trek fandom that have driven me nuts lately by mentioning – and I’m sure they’re usually joking, but still – “oh hey, it’s 2024. We’re gonna have the Bell Riots. We’re going to have the dystopia of season 2 of Picard. We gotta go through this stuff to get to the Federation.”

But what if we didn’t? What if we didn’t resign ourselves with a defeatist shrug to hitting rock bottom, and just decided to start being kinder to each other now and start building a better future now? Who knows what we might wind up with?

Maybe even a future better than Star Trek.