I had survived the final stretch of frantic development and app releases, and now everything was in place for the show.
The combination technical test / opening celebration took place the night before the main show in the front lounge of the Clarendon Hotel. I had stationed myself in a corner to help people who couldn't get the app working properly on their phone. Things began with a round of sea shanties by The Mizzen Crew. They even honoured us visiting Nova Scotians with a rendition of Barrett's Privateers – I enjoyed how those North-West voices pronounced "fire no guns".
The opening night was topped off with a performance by Barton Road Community Choir. My technical support duties finished and all the apps properly updated, I could finally have myself a pint and some snacks and unclench my shoulders. The theatre types partied into the night but I went back to the AirBnB to try to get some sleep.
The next morning I confirmed that all the latest versions of everything were properly live in the various app stores and online and then headed out.
We were lucky to have a mostly sunny day, a bit windy from the Bay but at least no rain. On the way I saw a local taking his horse out on the low-tide seabed, as one does in Lancashire I guess.
This inspired me to get offshore myself and take a shortcut across the semicircle of the Promenade, over the rippled low-tide sands which reminded me of the shallow shores near Wallace, back in Nova Scotia.
The production was scattered all across west-side Morecambe, but we were able to set up our headquarters at the More Music building in the heart of it. I set myself up near the entrance, to provide any extra technical support that might be needed, but mostly to ensure everything went smoothly on the server. I had an ad hoc control centre set up: two iPads, a MacBook Pro, and an external screen, all tracking different aspects of the system and the production. I had dialled up a lot of extra cloud server capacity for the duration of the show, just in case. Now we just had to wait.
At exactly 2pm, the apps on everybody's phones were going to switch to the "Overture" screens, with an introduction to the afternoon's scavenger hunt. After that the phones would start checking in with the server and getting assigned to locations, and the adventures would begin. At least that was the plan. We wouldn't know for sure until 2 o'clock. For now, all four of the screens were showing nothing much happening at all.
I remember when I watched the 2019 Apollo 11 documentary a few years ago I found my heart racing in anxiety as the countdown neared 0. Even though I knew very well that everything went fine with the launch, I had been in that "waiting to see if your hard work succeeded or not" headspace too many times not to feel the worry.
Here's a shot they caught of me with about 90 seconds to go. Just a little anxious!
2pm came. There were no explosions or screams. No angry mob stormed in waving their frozen phones. The server logs started rolling smoothly by. Funnily enough the experience of watching server logs is indeed like watching the screens in The Matrix: seeing the data scroll by, you can recognize the reassuring shapes of regular database and network calls – and the much different and more worrisome shapes of error reports. Thankfully I didn't see any of those.
Soon enough the back-end tracking started showing people being assigned to the various locations. This was one of the key functions that couldn't really be tested before it was actually running with lots of people, so this was another big relief.
The funny thing with these NowHere projects is that I never actually get to experience the show myself. I had seen some rehearsals of a few scenes, but I spent the entire runtime of the real show at my control station, making sure things were working. That said, I did have a unique view of the bigger picture, seeing where everybody was (more or less) as they wandered around the neighbourhood:
A few people came in for some help with much older phones, but given all the activity around the neighborhood, it was pretty quiet in our headquarters. In these kinds of projects, no news is good news. If the app is working like it's supposed to, it should feel almost invisible to the participants. If the app is being taken for granted then I know it's working properly.
At 5pm the main part of the show wrapped up. The server logs slowed their churn. The checkins stopped. We had made it! Now for the grand finale.
I got a ride over to Poulton Memorial Hall, where things were getting set up for the final Gathering. It had such a familiar feeling of church and community halls back home I expected a youth dance or maybe a Ceilidh to break out.
That screen you can see in the back was the source of my last panic of the production. Each location in HereNowThis was based on a theme like "Love" or "Nostalgia" or "Belief" and at the end of each experience the app would pop up a text box for the participants to enter their own reflections on that theme. All these comments were to be compiled together into an animated "Blueprint" and projected onto that big screen.
The challenge was that our projection specialists were in Canada but the software and the projector were of course in the UK. As participants started to gather I saw some frantic poking at laptops and anxious phone calls. I ended up throwing the feedback entries into a Keynote presentation as a last minute fallback plan in case the full animated version didn't work out. By the time I had put it together, a "silent disco" headphones audience-participation live dance piece by Susan Kempster had already started.
Soon I heard from backstage that the projection software had loaded everything properly and was ready to go. Finally I was free to enjoy the countdown as the Back Chat Brass Band played. (I'll never hear H-O-T-T-O-G-O again without imagining trombones.)
The final minutes counted down, and the animated "Blueprint" appeared on the screen. The show was over and everything had worked! I shared my worried "before" face earlier; here is my relieved and accomplished "after" face:
