April 26, 2013
We snuggled into our media flat last night after a long and busy day of settling and editing, and woke up after four hours of sleep to our 6am alarms. We had to get all our gear together, eat breakfast from our newly purchased grocery stash of fresh fruits, yogurt and milk. It was magical to eat a piece of produce that hadn't been frozen or steamed. Pure magic in our mouths.
We called three taxis to tote our gear and selves over to the Axa Auditorium where the final Unreasonable at Sea culminating event was to be held. The auditorium was beautiful and big. We had to get set up with four cameras on the event, plus one roving camera to shoot the backstage happenings with the entrepreneurs before they headed on to do their final pitch before Unreasonable at State. On top of setting up for the event, we also had a meeting with the learning partner we were working on another video for to get approval on the second rough cut. It was a crazy morning, but the team handled it really well. Go team!
The event was awesome! All the entrepreneurs were on their A-game and totally rocked their pitches. We had filmed their final practice pitches on the ship before landing in Barcelona, and the mentors that were on board tore them apart. There was so much that the mentors wanted them to change. It was interesting to see what they changed and what feedback they totally ignored. It's a subjective thing, so they did what they thought was best, and it turned out brilliantly. Everyone came so far from when we did the original "elevator pitches" during the first week on the ship. Those elevator pitches were so bad, that we never even posted them.
Before many of the entrepreneurs pitched, the episodes that we had done along the way were shown. I think the value in that was not only that you got to see their business in action and understand more about it, but also that you fell in love with their personality before hearing them pitch. The audience got to see Tendekayi in the Hong Kong episode doing sign language with the hearing impaired people he employs there, they got to see how entertaining Pedro is then how passionate he is about eliminating deaths from unclean drinking water, and they got to see Protei getting down and dirty in Hawaii, digging through meters of plastic as they investigated how their sailing drones could help in the area.
Watching the videos we had done brought back so many memories from this trip. Both from things that Matt and I shot, things I edited, but also flashbacks to the places we slept, the things we ate and the people we met while we gathered this footage. The smells came back and the sounds came back to me. The first video brought tears to my eyes because of how bittersweet the end of this journey is. I had to get it together, though, because I was one of the cameras on stage in front of the 500 people at the event and the lights were about to come up. Daniel recognized the media team and offered up a big thank you and a bow. It was a great moment. It made me feel so proud of what we accomplished in these short four months.
Local entrepreneurs from the Barcelona area also pitched in-between the Unreasonable entrepreneurs which offered a great energy between new and old business ideas. One start-up that I was particularly interested in was Changers.com which sells an energy independence kit where you can use a solar panel to charge a battery that can charge small devices like your phone. You use the solar panel in your house or on your backpack, then use the energy whenever you want it via the battery pack. But, it doesn't stop there. They also have an online community where you keep track of the hours of clean energy that you produce and use yourself, then you can make purchases with the credits on the online community. Kind of like carbon credits, but on a small, small scale. Interesting idea, but it leaves me with many general questions about the infrastructure of energy around the world. Like, if I charged my phone using only solar power, and the little electricity box outside our house read a smaller number, and we paid less this month, would that actually change the amount of energy that the energy company produced? Just because I didn't use it this month, does that mean that they didn't burn the coal to produce it? Or, does it just get used elsewhere or just get wasted? I don't know. Experts: e-mail me (shawna (at) massfxmedia dot com) so I can ask you more questions, por favor.
In Spain, they don't do regular lunch breaks. Since their lunch starts around 2pm, the event ran straight through from 10am to 3pm, and we had all eaten breakfast around 7am. Our awesome producers brought around apples and bananas for snacks, but we were still starving by 3:30 when we finally got our gear back to the media flat and headed out to find some lunch.
We arrived at a vegetarian restaurant around 3:50pm, and were welcomed with some head scratching. The way this restaurant worked, like many lunch places, is that it has a set menu where you choose a starter between a couple options, a soup, salad, main course and dessert. Since they close at 4pm (as all Spaniards know) they didn't have much left to feed the ten of us. The guy said that he would make it work and seated us upstairs in a little loft.
We got a mix of soups, both of which were delicious, some boiled potatoes and broccoli with some sort of sour cream topping, an unbelievably tasty couscous and veggie stuffed squash and then piles of fresh fruit for dessert. We told the waiter that we had come from a ship and couldn't wait to eat fresh food. He brought extra fruit and said we could take it home. As we left, they were receiving the food for the next day, and the man gave us a whole pineapple and a crate of strawberries to take with us. Such nice people here!
The team was exhausted and we went back to the flat thinking we would take a short nap, and all ended up sleeping until 7:30pm. We woke up and headed out to dinner at a crepe place across town that Mark and Larissa highly recommended. It was delicious. I had a spinach, strawberry, goat cheese and pine nut salad, and attempted to order in spanish. I was laughed at, but I think in a cute way and not a you-should-be-embarassed-for-trying-out-our-language way. I also got a spiced chai. Didn't even come close to India's chai, but the warm tea was good for a cool, drizzly night. We ate crepes and drank our chai's in a warm restaurant with good conversation. Oli was cute enough that she finagled two free dessert crepes out of the place, and we all enjoyed extra chocolate and banana crepes. Too good.
Matt, Oli, Patrick, Jessie and I decided we would walk back to the apartment and get to know the area a little bit better since we still have a week here. We walked by a concert hall where many young people were standing outside waiting to go to a concert. They said you can just buy tickets there, and we considered doing that later this week. The buildings are old and beautiful in Barcelona and the city is clean and feels safe. We visited a couple grocery stores trying to find tortilla chips for Oli to make us Mexican breakfast the next morning, but didn't find any.
We arrived back at the media flat and finished up some final work from the day before and hit the hay around 2am. I'd like to think that we're preparing for getting back to Colorado.
We snuggled into our media flat last night after a long and busy day of settling and editing, and woke up after four hours of sleep to our 6am alarms. We had to get all our gear together, eat breakfast from our newly purchased grocery stash of fresh fruits, yogurt and milk. It was magical to eat a piece of produce that hadn't been frozen or steamed. Pure magic in our mouths.
We called three taxis to tote our gear and selves over to the Axa Auditorium where the final Unreasonable at Sea culminating event was to be held. The auditorium was beautiful and big. We had to get set up with four cameras on the event, plus one roving camera to shoot the backstage happenings with the entrepreneurs before they headed on to do their final pitch before Unreasonable at State. On top of setting up for the event, we also had a meeting with the learning partner we were working on another video for to get approval on the second rough cut. It was a crazy morning, but the team handled it really well. Go team!
The event was awesome! All the entrepreneurs were on their A-game and totally rocked their pitches. We had filmed their final practice pitches on the ship before landing in Barcelona, and the mentors that were on board tore them apart. There was so much that the mentors wanted them to change. It was interesting to see what they changed and what feedback they totally ignored. It's a subjective thing, so they did what they thought was best, and it turned out brilliantly. Everyone came so far from when we did the original "elevator pitches" during the first week on the ship. Those elevator pitches were so bad, that we never even posted them.
Before many of the entrepreneurs pitched, the episodes that we had done along the way were shown. I think the value in that was not only that you got to see their business in action and understand more about it, but also that you fell in love with their personality before hearing them pitch. The audience got to see Tendekayi in the Hong Kong episode doing sign language with the hearing impaired people he employs there, they got to see how entertaining Pedro is then how passionate he is about eliminating deaths from unclean drinking water, and they got to see Protei getting down and dirty in Hawaii, digging through meters of plastic as they investigated how their sailing drones could help in the area.
Watching the videos we had done brought back so many memories from this trip. Both from things that Matt and I shot, things I edited, but also flashbacks to the places we slept, the things we ate and the people we met while we gathered this footage. The smells came back and the sounds came back to me. The first video brought tears to my eyes because of how bittersweet the end of this journey is. I had to get it together, though, because I was one of the cameras on stage in front of the 500 people at the event and the lights were about to come up. Daniel recognized the media team and offered up a big thank you and a bow. It was a great moment. It made me feel so proud of what we accomplished in these short four months.
Local entrepreneurs from the Barcelona area also pitched in-between the Unreasonable entrepreneurs which offered a great energy between new and old business ideas. One start-up that I was particularly interested in was Changers.com which sells an energy independence kit where you can use a solar panel to charge a battery that can charge small devices like your phone. You use the solar panel in your house or on your backpack, then use the energy whenever you want it via the battery pack. But, it doesn't stop there. They also have an online community where you keep track of the hours of clean energy that you produce and use yourself, then you can make purchases with the credits on the online community. Kind of like carbon credits, but on a small, small scale. Interesting idea, but it leaves me with many general questions about the infrastructure of energy around the world. Like, if I charged my phone using only solar power, and the little electricity box outside our house read a smaller number, and we paid less this month, would that actually change the amount of energy that the energy company produced? Just because I didn't use it this month, does that mean that they didn't burn the coal to produce it? Or, does it just get used elsewhere or just get wasted? I don't know. Experts: e-mail me (shawna (at) massfxmedia dot com) so I can ask you more questions, por favor.
In Spain, they don't do regular lunch breaks. Since their lunch starts around 2pm, the event ran straight through from 10am to 3pm, and we had all eaten breakfast around 7am. Our awesome producers brought around apples and bananas for snacks, but we were still starving by 3:30 when we finally got our gear back to the media flat and headed out to find some lunch.
We arrived at a vegetarian restaurant around 3:50pm, and were welcomed with some head scratching. The way this restaurant worked, like many lunch places, is that it has a set menu where you choose a starter between a couple options, a soup, salad, main course and dessert. Since they close at 4pm (as all Spaniards know) they didn't have much left to feed the ten of us. The guy said that he would make it work and seated us upstairs in a little loft.
We got a mix of soups, both of which were delicious, some boiled potatoes and broccoli with some sort of sour cream topping, an unbelievably tasty couscous and veggie stuffed squash and then piles of fresh fruit for dessert. We told the waiter that we had come from a ship and couldn't wait to eat fresh food. He brought extra fruit and said we could take it home. As we left, they were receiving the food for the next day, and the man gave us a whole pineapple and a crate of strawberries to take with us. Such nice people here!
The team was exhausted and we went back to the flat thinking we would take a short nap, and all ended up sleeping until 7:30pm. We woke up and headed out to dinner at a crepe place across town that Mark and Larissa highly recommended. It was delicious. I had a spinach, strawberry, goat cheese and pine nut salad, and attempted to order in spanish. I was laughed at, but I think in a cute way and not a you-should-be-embarassed-for-trying-out-our-language way. I also got a spiced chai. Didn't even come close to India's chai, but the warm tea was good for a cool, drizzly night. We ate crepes and drank our chai's in a warm restaurant with good conversation. Oli was cute enough that she finagled two free dessert crepes out of the place, and we all enjoyed extra chocolate and banana crepes. Too good.
Matt, Oli, Patrick, Jessie and I decided we would walk back to the apartment and get to know the area a little bit better since we still have a week here. We walked by a concert hall where many young people were standing outside waiting to go to a concert. They said you can just buy tickets there, and we considered doing that later this week. The buildings are old and beautiful in Barcelona and the city is clean and feels safe. We visited a couple grocery stores trying to find tortilla chips for Oli to make us Mexican breakfast the next morning, but didn't find any.
We arrived back at the media flat and finished up some final work from the day before and hit the hay around 2am. I'd like to think that we're preparing for getting back to Colorado.
No comments:
Post a Comment