cast aside

Sadly, I never got around to mentioning EVECAST in the mag. …Or rather, I did, but after some necessary deadline-day re-jiggery just before Xmas, it was decided to make room for another story and mark a mental note to make good the decision in another issue. Unfortunately EVECAST has since gone the way of EVE TV Weekly, which it was doing a decent-enough job of replacing. Rather less tragically it seems that after just four irregular episodes, tribute in print will elude the fledgling game station a while longer… a mention here in the blathering online footnotes of the real thing will have to do for now:

Hosted by the immobile VampireZIM, EVECAST.TV seemed to pretty-much do what EVE TV Weekly did; namely put together news, interviews and regular bits into the tried-and-tested TV magazine format. Some of these it did very well and some of these it didn’t, but considering it had a couple of big and very expensive shoes to fill, it’s perhaps not so surprising that the dark-glassed host (and director / producer / pretty-much everything else) had to call it a day.

Premature endings are not exclusive to TV broadcasts (insert Firefly reference here). The EVE community is littered with the half-built skeletons of fan projects that didn’t quite get off the production line. EVECAST got further than most and for that deserves much appluase. Mr. ZIM managed to hit the nail on the head however in his video eulogy when he said that crafting the show was a little too much work for one person (which perhaps explained the need to shade the eyes). Frequently, no matter how many people you enlist, it is always one person that drives such projects, especially when the good-intentioned volunteers drop back into their real lives. Ambition is a great motivator, but one big TV show is a beast of a project, and without the resources to fuel it, the tanks will quickly run dry. Perhaps a number of smaller shows might have worked – we may never know. I’m borrowing from my old EVE TV notebook here, but how about “The 0.0 Show” or “Carebear Corner” – shorter pieces that wouldn’t have needed a host to read to camera, or that could have been as irregular as real-life permitted.

I still hope to see a regular EVE videocast being made, but it may have to come directly from CCP in light of the work and costs required. Given the talent that has passed by both sides of the cameras to end up there, it would be remiss of Iceland’s top codeshop not to make use of the resources that it has so diligently acquired. Still, at least there is the Alliance Tournament to look forward to…. which is where EVE’s TV ambitions originated, after all.