Wednesday, June 17, 2009

How to throw your own Buffyfest - Four Part Series

In case you didn't already know, the Buffyfest Blog was born out of a real Buffyfest - a small, private, all-things-Buffy celebration. We're coming up on our 4th year and on June 20th we're turning this year's 'fest into a Guerrilla drive-in where we're mounting a projector and FM transmitting the audio to our car speakers. We'll definitely recap that in all its glory afterwards (we're fully expecting to get kicked out by the police from wherever we land, which from what we understand is the point of the whole thing!) In the mean time, we thought it'd be fun to post a "How To" guide, so others might follow in this tradition. Buffyfest isn't just a day of watching episodes - we've got food, booze, games and gift bags to add to the fun. And we've done something entirely different every year.
To kick off this series, we're going to focus on what episodes to watch. Of course, you can use whatever method you want to decide, but this is ours. Back in the day, we only had a small private forum and we'd use it to plan our Buffyfests. One main reason for this would be the multiple threads dedicated to polls for voting on what episodes we'd be watching. First we'd edit the nominees down to 4-6 episodes and then let the voting begin by all the guests. These, of course, would sometimes end up in a "Sudden death" thread.

Some examples would be:
Dynamite Drop-ins by Jonathan (FYI, our nominees were: "What's my line pt. 2", "Reptile Boy", "Earshot" and "Superstar" for the poll - with "Earshot" winning.)

Favorite Origin Story (our nominees were: "Fool For Love", "Restless", "Family", "The Dark Age", and "Selfless" with "Restless" taking it.)

Best Character Death episode (nominees: "The Body", "Passion", "Seeing Red", "Prophecy Girl", and "Not Fade Away" - "Passion" won that by a lot.)

Last year at our Buffyfest Backyard BBQ, we decided to vote on specific themes instead. It didn't go over very well and we really don't recommend it, but for the record the theme we ended up with was "The Period Pieces" and it consisted of "Amends", "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?", and "Darla". We also threw Dr. Horrible in the mix at the pre-party.

If you and your peeps want to use the forum polling method, you can get your own free forum at the following sites, among others:
www.proboards.com

Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow which will be all about the food.


2 comments:

Steph said...

So much fun!!! I can't wait to see the food post. For ours I baked a coffin cake and made staked through the heart cut out cookies! :-)

Tara said...

That's awesome, Steph!