FCSS Day: Criticism

I am disappointed. To be fair, this time the days of our both faculties were less than unsuccessful. There were a handful of damn good reasons for this to happen, and thus everything was quite predictable. In my opinion, FCSS day was just a disaster, even probably worse than ours was. Summarizing the experience of both events, I can compose a list of what I personally consider to be the essence of failure and what should be avoided at all means when preparing a faculty day show:

• Newfags can't triforce — can't stress this enough. The auditory should be studied a priori and new students should not sit with square eyes wondering what the thing is all about. Of course, some jokes for the oldies are never bad, but this should only be carefully weighted, not to turn the event as a whole into a boredom-fest to youngsters. As a rule of the thumb, expect your public to be a second year student. They do know something about the recent history of university, but they totally will not understand your satire about the things having had place 5 years in the past. This equally applies to outsiders, which leads to the next point:
• Keep your style, but keep the humor within the range of understanding by a third person. Normally, we expect and welcome guests coming to our faculty days. That is a grave headache as usual, because we can't expect them to get our inside jokes with ease. It is exactly what happened today, as I ended up explaining most of FCSS day content to the husband of my colleague and my old friend who were occasionally present at the event. Professional specifics look cool, but to present them in an understandable fashion is indeed a skill to master.
• Famous people are not enough by themselves. Now, *cough*, let's just skip the plagiarism part with the driving school promoter, that will purely lie on their own conscience. It is critically incorrect to showcase a person just because of their fame. The person should be an organic part of the show, otherwise it looks like showing a trophy. This is even more the case when the popularity of the person in question is disputed.
• Parodying teachers does get old. All right, sometimes it's hilarious. However, some teachers are a well deep of humor by themselves and trying to mimic them all the time will backlash on you. A parody of a funny person risks to sound worse than the actual person would do in fact, and thus this gives no novelty in the best case scenario and a disappointment of public in the worst.
• Art, decorations and media should be shown properly. Some part of your audience will obviously have sight problems, tell statistics. Showing important information on a A4 sheets is nonsense. Not only the rear part of the hall will only see but colored papers, but the majority of the viewers will probably do as well, judging from simple mathematical assumptions. Everything to read should be shown on beamer, period. Unless it's written with meter-high letters of course. Also, speaking of beamer operation, there should never be operating system interface on the presentation screen. You're computer scientists, come on!
• Breaking the fourth wall should only be employed when the awesomeness of results justifies the intrusion. That's simply it. People dislike being engaged in action. You must be over 100% sure that the effects you are trying to achieve will overweight the discomfort of the auditory. Mosksalevsky tried to create an avant-guarde show last year and failed having done too much pressure on the viewer with too less output. Tonight it was even worse as that was not an artistic search, it was just weak.
• Organisation is the key. Despite everything, that is the aspect where we were seriously outmatched by our FCSS «rivals». Even the brightest idea will fade away if it's not properly rehearsed and planned. We had a very narrow window to prepare and thus, our show was largely undisciplined and spontaneous. Planning ahead ensures the success, while not doing so destroys every little hope of it.

Now, we'll start preparing for FNS day '11 right now already!