Behind the Scenes with Keynote/Demo staging
by Robert Hess
Lights, Camera, Action!
It’s just before 8:30am, you saunter into the keynote room and while the room looks pretty full, you see some available seating halfway up the room on the middle right. You pick up your pace a little bit, because it seems like you aren’t the only one who has noticed that handful of seats. Just as you sit down, the music changes, the lights dim, and you can tell the show is about to begin.
The keynote at the Microsoft PDC is where executives, product managers, and other leaders from the company will carefully lay out the key technologies that knit together and form the cohesive foundation that developers will use to bring to market key applications, solutions, and services. In addition to colorful slides which graphically portray the way everything works together, there are also a variety of demos which are used to help illustrate how these technologies can be used.
As the keynote comes to a close, you briefly look back over what transpired, and recall a few key technologies that you want to make sure you find some sessions on, you also mentally note one or two of the demos which were presented and try to think about how that approach might work best in your own applications. You then quickly exit the room.
The Hidden City
Unbeknownst to you, there was just a huge sigh of relief coming from backstage. That would have been me, thankful that another set of demos has gone off without a hitch. To get to that point it took months of footwork, preparation, and a small team of various people all working closely together in order to coordinate the various hardware needs that each demo and demoer might have had. I suspect that the effort that goes into making sure even the simplest technology demo works flawlessly on-stage is something that many in the audience don’t even consider. I thought perhaps you might enjoy just a little bit of a glimpse back-stage to get some insight to the overall process.
The backstage is essentially a little city unto itself. There are little communities scattered throughout. One is for managing all of the sound, another for the slides, another for video production, and then there is “Demo Alley”, which is where I typically spend all of my time, coordinating all of the demos that will be presented on-stage. You may not realize this, but each and every demo you see being performed on-stage has not only a backup system that can be switched to in milliseconds should the need arise, but there is also somebody “shadowing” the on-stage demoer so that should we need to switch over for some reason, the backup machine is in-synch with what the demoer was doing. While demo failures are relatively rare, it is always best to be prepared for the worst.
Demo Craft
At an event like the PDC, the potential for demo failure can be a little more than at a typical event. The PDC we try to show technology that is six months, a year, or perhaps even more away from being generally available. You can just imagine what this means to the stability of what we might be running for the demo. Add to this the fact that we will also usually try to show multiple (unfinished) technologies working together, and it’s nail-biting time!
Sure, we could simply do mockups for many of the demos. Work up fancy animations that only look like we’re showing real code, or use other tricks. But that sort of defeats the purpose; it wouldn’t really show the audience what the technology will do. Sure, there might be times when the technology we want to illustrate is still on the drawing boards, but even in that case we will code up a simulation which as closely as possible matches the process flow of the actual technology. It’s all about actually showing the audience what the technology is capable of, and how it will benefit them.
Another side of getting demos prepared is carefully working on the script that will be used. Often, the hardest part about these scripts is working them down to as short of a time as possible. I believe it was Blaise Pascal who once apologized for a writing a long letter because he lacked the time to make it shorter. Likewise, it’s relatively easy to do a long demo, but to trim it down to its most compact form, without losing its impact, can be very difficult. When there is a finite amount of time however, and far too many things vying for a piece of it, it is necessary to be both minimalistic, as well as complete, with everything.
In the end, we have a small army of people who are trying to pull the various demos together. They are working against the clock, and often resort to electronic versions of bailing wire and duct tape to get pre-alpha versions of software up and running properly. So as you are sitting in the audience this year, watching somebody doing what seems like a rather simple (albeit important) demo, just remember that behind that demo are a handful of people who are sweating bullets at that moment and hoping that it isn’t “their” demo which crashes.
Demo-Lition
Part of knowing how to be best prepared for demo failure however, is having lived through a failure and learned from it. Perhaps one of the biggest demo failures I was involved with, was several years ago when we were presenting a day of demos which revolved around showing features of various websites and webservers being combined together. By its very nature, it required live access to live servers on the actual internet. To account for possible problems, we had a redundant internet line backstage that we could instantly switch to if needed. But as you may have guessed by now, this wasn’t enough. Just as the first demoer was walking to the stage, the main internet line went dead. The backup was dead as well. Quick and frantic calls showed that it wasn’t just our lines, but all lines within a two block radius were down. They remained down through the entire presentation. Since then, when the situation demanded it, we have had as backup a satellite internet connection that we could switch to if necessary.
Of course, all of this just makes it that much more exciting. So this year, as you are sitting out front watching the technology parade, know that I am back stage trying to control the mayhem with fingers crossed.
Time-lapse
I thought I’d also share this link with you of a nice little time-lapse we did at this year’s MIX09, which shows the setting up of the keynote room.
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