cut & paste

Tonight we ventured over to Hollywood for the Cut & Paste competition. This is an event happening in cities worldwide and includes competitions in LA, San Francisco, and New York. The winners from around the world will end up in one final competition in New York City next year. Basically, it is a live design competition with contestants on stage going head to head creating digital designs around a given theme. They are given 15 minutes to create, and everything they do on their computers during that time frame is projected live onto huge screens for the audience to watch. I, of course, would never dream of doing a creative competition like this - I would choke immediately upon getting on stage. Or, I would more likely not even make it to the stage at all and would be throwing up somewhere. My husband, however, is a completely different personality type who would probably do well in this kind of situation. He tends to thrive under pressure and can easily block out hundreds of people staring at him. So I told him that he should enter this next year. 🙂

Anyway, in true LA fashion, they forced us to wait in a line out in front of the old theater where the competition was being held, not because there was not room inside, but because they wanted to make it look like "something important" was happening. You tend to see lines like this a lot in LA - outside various venues, restaurants, etc. I really think this tactic of "make people wait outside even when there is no logical reason to because the more people there are in line, the more buzz it will create and the more exciting we will look" is rather overdone. But anyway, after finally getting inside, we found out we had to wait some more, as nothing was starting when they had said it would start. So we turned to our cell phone for entertainment, and here are our fascinating boredom shots of ourselves in a dimly lit theater:

How did we ever entertain ourselves while waiting before cell phones?

And here are the more interesting, albeit fuzzy, shots of the actual competition (and dj).

I have to say that although computer-based creativity is not necessarily my thing, it was actually really cool to watch the competitors design in a short time frame, having their every move scrutinized by the public.