This one shows the big Mao in the background. The conference is in the Science and Technology Building.Blogger has just put a video icon up. Let's see what happens....
(The videos and photos are from my elderly Nokia phone, so the quality, especially of the little videos, is pretty dodgy. And the glitter confetti cannoning down on us at the end just looks like video noise.)
I gave a "thank you" talk here representing the foreign guests at the top of the red carpet. Then, later in the afternoon, I gave a talk on Fantasy -- examing the roots of fantastic literature and pointing out that they were the same as the roots of mainstream literature, and then talking about the recent divide between realistic and fantastic fiction and why I thought this was and why it seemed to be repairing itself. And then I talked about imagining things and why people should.
I also signed a lot of things. There are about 4000 people at this convention and they like their signatures.
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A little info trickled in on the things I wondered about yesterday...
Theatres make very little money from films they show. I know that the cinema I work at in the UK sells the tickets for £6.60 each and makes around 50p off each ticket. Most of the cinema's profit comes from the refreshments, which is why the cinemas charge so much for the food and drink. I hope that answers the question on the last blog post.
(Neil, I'd appreciate it if my name wasn't used, since talking about my job like that is technically a breach of my contract.)
and one from the UAE... (we have blog readers in the UAE. Who knew?)
Not so much a question as a comment from someone who saw Stardust in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is very much a movie-going culture (in the extreme summer heat there is little else to do) and it is quite rare for films to do badly, but Stardust was poorly marketed and very few people seem to know what to expect of it, and consequently whether or not to see it. I must say I loved the film, as did the people I know who did go to see it.
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Sensible Guardian Blog article on adapting books into comics at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/08/comic_versions_of_books_need_a.html. And now, breakfast...