Closing Notes

[eosrose]

After months of blood, sweat, and tears we have reached the close of the first round of the Podfic Big Bang. Over the past few weeks, the community has shared 21 podfics (15 for the main bang, 6 for the bonus bang) and 28 cover designs. Many podfic projects were enhanced with music and/or sound effects; alas, it was not always clear that sound enhancements had been made or who had made those enhancements, so we can't give specifics on that count. Overall, it was a very impressive showing! All participants should be very proud of themselves. *\o/*

Particular accolades go out to:

• deadflowers5 for submitting the first piece of cover art
• chemm80 for submitting the first completed podfic
• martinius for submitting the first sound enhancements--and having created brand new Creative Commons music to boot!
• weimar27 for submitting the longest podfic (at 8:19:51 for the standard version & 8:41:31 for the music-enhanced version)
• sophinisba and eosrose for submitting the most podfics (3 each)
• bessyboo for submitting contributions to the most podfic projects in an artistic capacity (a total of 4)

At this point it is unclear of whether we'll run again next year. If we do, here are a few changes we've been considering:

• streamline the podficcer sign-up process by merging primary project title submission with the initial sign-ups; keep podficcer sign-ups open longer to make up the difference
• collect email addresses with sign-ups so that we can contact more easily when problems and/or questions arise
• officially extend the recording period of the challenge to a full 5 or 6 months from the time sign-ups open
• make sure submissions aren't due around the time many people are facing final exams, etc.
• create a parallel community on dreamwidth for people who prefer posting there

In the meantime, eosrose has recently been in touch with the lovely people over at Archive of Our Own regarding posting non-textual fanworks like podfic and the upcoming Torrent of Our Own intended for media-hosting. Good news: (a) TO3 staff hopes to have media-hosting capabilities go live sometime this year, and (b) podficcers are welcome to post external downloads to works and/or embed streaming media RIGHT NOW. No need to wait. In light of this, eosrose took the liberty of creating a Collection for podfics that were included in the big bang (both the main bang and the bonus bang). If you’re interested in adding your work, please feel free. If you need an invite code, just send eosrose your email address.

Thanks go out to everyone for participating!

Your mods,
eosrose and dreaming_athena

EDIT: To add your podfic (or art) to the AO3 collection, go to the first field in the "Associations" portion of the work submission form, which is "Post to Collections/Challenges". Just type in "podfic_big_bang_2011" and your work should be added to the collection.

Comments

[weimar27.livejournal.com]

That's very cool. Thanks for organizing this challenge.

[deadflowers5.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this challenge. This was so unique!
And thanks for thanking me. (So many thank in one comment.)

[cantarina]

Thanks to everyone involved! As a listener, it was a huge treat to have so much awesome long podfic show up on my flist every day! (The bonus round in particular. It was like my birthday had been moved to May :D)

[sophinisba]

Thanks a lot for all your hard work on this! It was great to have so many long podfics and especially the collaborations between podficcers and artists that this challenge made possible. I also like your ideas for changes for a possible second round (especially communicating by email and on Dreamwidth). I always really appreciate it when mods are open to suggestions and changes for making a challenge better. :)

[bessyboo.livejournal.com]

Thank you guys so much for doing this; it was such a blast, and I hope you do it again! :D

And for a timing suggestion, may I suggest January-June? If you start in January, Podbang at amplificathon is already over, and if you have posting at the beginning of June, 1) that would be five full months, 2) pretty much everyone is done with school by then, and 3) amplificathon is handily still running, so people could get points for that. Just my two cents ;)

[eosrose]

That's a good suggestion! We'll keep that in mind. :D

[podklb.livejournal.com]

Could you explain more about how to add a podfic to the AO3 collection? I just tried, and I was able to make a post for my podfic here (http://archiveofourown.org/users/klb/pseuds/klb/works), but I can't figure out how to add it to the collection. (Also, is there any other info it needs?)

[eosrose]

It look like you have it figured out. I had checked that the collection was "moderated" by mistake, so your addition hadn't showed up yet. I approved it and unchecked the "moderation" ticky, so everyone's work should show up in the collection right after adding it now. :)

Also, your information all seems good to me. I'm not at all picky about how people want to display their work over at AO3. It's up to you how much or how little you want to include.