Into the Drink

As most of you who frequent the Into The Drink Facebook page know by now, our screening at the DEMA 2009 show was a success.  Exceedingly and abundantly.

DEMA, for those of you who don’t know, is the Diving Equipment & Marketing Association and their annual trade show is the holy week for the billion-dollar cottage industry that is scuba diving.  It’s the one time you’re likely to walk into a convention center for a dive trade show and hear about eight different languages being spoken as you’re going down the escalator.  On my way to the airport at the end of the week I shared a cab with a store owner from suburban Tokyo.  He’d been going to DEMA for 20 years.

I know I’m gonna catch hell for saying this publicly, but as a rule I’m generally not a big fan of trade shows.  I see them, more often than not, as a necessary evil.  There are outstanding qualities to all of them but for the most part, until the exhibit floor closes for the day and I get to go to Denny’s and then the hotel bar I’m pretty much crawling in my skin.  This is because lately I’ve been forced to stand in a sizable booth with big banners that have life-size pictures of me trying to look more badass than I actually am while a giant plasma TV loops episodes of a show that I host.  So it’s more than a little uncomfortable; smarmy.  It has a “Hey! Look at me!” feel to it.  It’s irritating beyond measure.  I stand there invariably feeling more obnoxious than I actually am.  And that’s pretty obnoxious.

DEMA, however, is different.  I’m not the sharpest business mind in the organization, but I knew enough to recognize that we needed a strong presence there.  If we believed in the show and we were confident in what we were sitting on, it should be a no-brainer.  Hit these people upside the head with something they are definitely not ready for.  Drop some jaws.  It became, for me, my debutante ball.  It was a coming-out party.  If all went well and we accomplished our goal, I’d be accepted by the neoprene confederates as a true southern lady.

It had already been decided that we would show a DEMA-specific cut of our Costa Rica adventure that was more or less a cross section of both episodes.  It was designed to give the Orlando audience a more well-rounded idea of the show and in the destinations where we do two-part episodes, typically the first half doesn’t cover all the bases.  We were co-hosting the screening with Bill Beard, who was giving away a trip to Costa Rica.  We’re all big fans of Bill so we were stoked to do it with him.  His massive email list certainly doesn’t hurt when you’re trying to spread the word, either.

In addition, we all thought it would be a good idea (given the brief 45 minutes we had) to also show a trailer for the show that included additional destinations.  Doug, our lead editor, had already created a very good piece for the occasion, one that was short and to the point.  A normal human being would have been satisfied and gone back to the job of enjoying a few days in central Florida.  A normal, well-adjusted, rational human being.

Yes, folks, here’s where our story takes a turn.
Somewhere around 9:00 the first night we arrived, Doug and I were sitting down for dinner when one of us came up with the idea to completely retool the trailer, and include footage from every destination we’d hit up to that point, including the previous week’s Cayman sojourn.  I’m going to assume it was my idea, because Doug would never have willingly subjected himself to the subsequent 72 hours of all-out chaos.

But once I get an idea in my head, I have to see it through.  Doug drew three short straws:  one, he’s the lead editor.  Two, he was sharing a hotel room with me.  Three, he’s the best creative wingman you could ask for.  So it was going down whether he liked it or not.  And so we set off to deliver the most eye-popping 4 minutes of video ever seen at a dive show.  Because, you know, the 3 minutes we already had simply weren’t good enough.

It was a team effort and, predictably, we each had our own ways of dealing with the stress of pulling this off by Friday at 4PM (I think we slept a total of 6 hours in 4 days).  Now whereas I simply stayed about 5 minutes away from a complete nervous breakdown at all times and eventually just started crying at regular intervals, Doug was much more entertaining.  As it turns out, when deprived of sleep for extended periods of time, Douglas Heckman begins to hallucinate.  Here’s an exchange that may or may have not taken place at 9AM one morning:

“Dude – you know that sweatshirt I had hanging on the closet door?”

“The dark gray one?”

“That’s it.”

“It’s a great sweatshirt.”

“Yeah, but after you left to go back to the convention center, I thought it was the housekeeping lady.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, dude.  It just started looking like her.  And I couldn’t figure out why she was in our room so I started talking to her in Spanish.  I kept telling her we didn’t need service and to please leave, but she wouldn’t.”

“That’s trippy.  I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

“I don’t.  That’s the really freaky part.”

“Awesome.”

It should be pointed out that the above Paoti Moment didn’t transpire on Friday just a few hours before the screening, at the end of a trying week; this was, like, the second morning in.  We still had miles to go.  But we were both determined to show the world that not only was Costa Rica not an isolated incident, we were sitting on a season’s worth of the most entertaining new travel show you could hope to have beamed to your receiver.   Neither of us were going to leave the Sunshine State without making the biggest, ballsiest impression we could.

It’s in times like these when I am very grateful that Doug and I are so alike and have been friends for so long.  We graduated high school together, from the same little town in central Pennsylvania.  We both went to film school.  We both went on to have considerable success as guitarists in various bands, taking it across the country and – in Doug’s case – even across Europe.  Most importantly, though, Doug and I are both graduates of the U2 School of Artistic Thought:  here, we learned to take our art seriously, never compromise our vision for that art (even if it means occasionally stealing from the thieves), and always create art that has no roof on it.  It should make as much sense in a stadium as it does on a television screen.

To put it simply, I knew we had one shot at making a very grand first impression.  I wasn’t going to go into that room with anything less than something that was going to leap off the screen and bitch-slap everyone watching.  Doug agreed.  So we didn’t sleep.  We scratched and kicked and clawed our way through it, day after day and night after night.  We saw people in the room that weren’t really there and we started sobbing in our paranoia.

No one had any clue that we were putting out fires and re-cutting audio tracks and rendering out the final versions of both projects literally minutes before showtime.  Again, this is where Doug’s ability to problem solve and think rationally in a moment of extreme terror comes in handy.  It’s also when you thank Jesus that you have a techno geek like Mark Santa Maria on your crew that can make any video file play through any A/V system.

In the end, the screening was a success beyond anyone’s expectations.  We had heard through the week that attendance at seminars ranged from respectable to embarrassing, so everyone kept their expectations reasonable.  But when 4:00 rolled around on Friday, not only was it standing-room-only for our premiere, we learned several days later that people had to be turned away at the door due to the fire marshall’s capacity limit for the room.  The buzz was off the charts in the days that followed and it’s still becoming evident long after DEMA 2009 finally convened just how loud Into The Drink resonated with the screening attendees.  Because we worked right up to showtime, the rest of the ITD crew hadn’t seen the trailer either, so the added bonus was watching their faces as they saw it for the first time.

The thing I’m most proud of is that not only was it something put together in the space of 72 hours, after we came up for air and committed it to tape Doug and I looked at what we’d done with pride.  We didn’t have the usual reaction to something banged out on no sleep and loads of caffeine, which is typically somewhere in the my-god-what-have-we-done range.  We were jubilant.  It made us excited to go into post-production on the rest of the episodes.

Earlier this week I was reminded of a presentation I did at Our World Underwater in Chicago in February of 2008.  I was feebly trying to convince the two people that showed up why they should get excited about the pilot we were shooting that fall in the Turks & Caicos.  In November of 2009, I was screening to a capacity room a year’s worth of accomplishments.  Just three months prior, those same two people – Carl & Cheryl Belles – were with us as we canvassed St. Croix.  It gave me some much-needed perspective.

I need to give a special nod to Tom Ingram, Donna Jannine Elliot and everyone at DEMA.  In an industry notorious for fearing change and resisting the new guard, these people are not only embracing new ideas but paving the way for them.  It’s big things like last-minute credentials to little things like Patricia in the media room always greeting us with a smile and a great attitude.  The Hershey’s Miniatures she kept on her desk were many times the only food Doug and I had for breakfast and lunch all week.

To any of you reading this who attended the screening, please know that your physical presence was, after 4 days of no sleep and being shackled to a laptop and hundreds of hours of footage, a source of elation that I’ll never be able to express adequately.  It meant more to me – and to all of us – than you realize.

It wouldn’t be something big and definitely not something special without detractors.  To the haters – some of whom I crossed paths with during the week – I am acutely aware that the time for you to make your feelings known on every message board and blog is coming very soon.  I prepare myself for it a little more every day.

I would also like to publicly thank Doug for being willing to take a risk, tax himself mentally and physically and follow me down a creative path.  I beat the shit out of him while we were in Orlando and he never once complained.  He is a great friend and an unbelievable editor.  That should be enough, but the fact that we have a shared artistic vision makes the process of creating a joy and his involvement crucial.

I still have no idea how the American masses will respond to Into The Drink once it goes to broadcast in January.  It’s something I can’t dwell on too long before the anxiety kicks in.  However, I have come to accept in recent weeks that I have become (or always was) what I used to preach against.  After laughing at all the pretentious douchebags I went to film school with I am, in the end, an artist. For the time being, television is my medium.

I have been given an incredible opportunity through this show to do exactly what I feel a burning desire to do:  connect with the world around me through art.   You have all given me the best job and a great life and I am incredibly grateful for every ounce of support and every word of encouragement.  I know I speak for the entire ITD crew.

Oh yeah, and to Titus, the waiter on the late-night shift at Denny’s who helped me set a personal record of two trips in one day to my favorite diner.  Since I didn’t eat anything most of the week, I figured it was cool to have the best chicken fingers on the planet twice in 24 hours.

All of you – it was as much your premiere as it was ours.

-A

*Insomuch as Doug and I are fervent supporters of the U2 School Of Artistic Thought, it should be noted that such a philosophy ended last year when they started putting out crap albums and doing overblown stadium tours.  We in no way endorse any U2 output after 2006.