Anime Kanarazu is a very interesting type of club to say the least. Instead of your typical “let’s all sit in a darkened room and watch anime for 5 hours” type of club, we try to do everything at our meetings. We have side events that we call collectively “panels” where one person basically takes the floor and talks about whatever they want to. For example, Kaishu has an art panel at most meetings, and allan8d8 does 2 panels; one on just general anime news, and another “manga corner” style panel. Then we come to my panel titled “Ace’s Anime”
I’ve been doing this panel for about 4 months now, although usually I toss it out the window and save any material I had if we have a low turn-out for whatever reason. I’ll be honest, this panel has not gone in the direction I wanted it to at all. My initial idea was to watch an episode of a series that I had pre-selected before each meeting, then formulate a group review of that episode to post on our website. So far, out of several times that we’ve completed this panel, only once has a group review come out of it, and there wasn’t nearly enough information for me to attempt to write an article.
This is not for lack of trying on my or my club member’s parts, but it seems that there is a fundamental flaw in the thought of group reviews. Yes, people do them all the time on blogs, but those tend to be a round table discussion amongst two or three people, not trying to formulate an opinion based on 15 people.
The other thing I’ve noticed is, its hard to get people to talk about an anime after watching it sometimes. This is primarily my fault. I’ve realized I have no idea what questions I should be asking aside from “So, what did you all think of that?” and obviously that yields little to no results.
That being said, I’m reaching another bump in the road. I’m running out of DVDs to use. Yes, I could start showing fansubs but I don’t feel it would be morally fit to show a fansub at a public showing (not to mention that the last time we did, it was a fansubbed trailer and someone began telling everyone in the area that we were pirating anime).
So my thoughts at this moment are this. I’ve been thinking for a month or longer on what to do about this stale presentation, and I’m pretty much at a loss. If I can come up with something new, this coming meeting (May 10th) will be the final use of Ace’s Anime, simply because I’m not sure where to take it, nor do I have any ideas on how to fix the seemingly inherent problems with the design of it.
It was a good idea for a panel, but it has just suffered setback and issues at every meeting.
@allan8d8: It was a good idea, but to say that the problems are due to setbacks at every meeting is an excuse. We’ve had several meetings where it went through as planned, and still nothing came out of it in the end.
I think with the group review idea, to get anything out of it that’s postable it would have to be closely guided. In other words maybe formulate a template of questions to ask everyone after the showing. That way everyone is focusing on the same aspect of what we are talking about instead of just all of the chatter.
@Kaishu: “The other thing I’ve noticed is, its hard to get people to talk about an anime after watching it sometimes. This is primarily my fault. I’ve realized I have no idea what questions I should be asking aside from “So, what did you all think of that?” and obviously that yields little to no results.”
That being said, there really are no good questions to ask when trying to do something like this.
You know, thinking on this, it may be have been better to kind of pick people out to ask a question. I mean ask like one question to three or four people specifically to get their answers. I find this usually helps when people hear another person’s thoughts or ideas told first, that others tend to open up. Almost like a college class discussion.