Tuesday, March 18, 2014
We arrived a few days prior to the Interactive portion of the festival to hang with friends, relax, and just prepare for the biggest week of the year for music, film, and tech. A few us were scheduled to do some hack and photoshop battles on Thursday night so we spent much of that day sitting poolside at the Hyatt prepping for 12 straight hours of screenburn. Tech highlights included Adobe's CJ Gammon and their free buffet at the Raddison, Funny or Die's Super Serious Show (feat. Jerrod Carmichael, T.J. Miller, and others), and most importantly Neil DeGrasse Tyson's quite moving keynote conversation prior to the premiere of Cosmos on Fox. Film highlight (we only got into one) was Boyhood, which was Oscar-caliber incredible -- although we have to admit we helped a bit on it. We also interviewed the lovely Lily Baldwin and Nicole Disson for their short film Sleepover LA but our camera bag containing most of the footage was stolen outside of Red Eyed Fly. We're hoping to put something together with what we have but for now watch this. As for music, we sadly didn't find a lot of new bands that blew us away. Those that we did love were mostly the same bands we've seen in the past at the festival or back in Los Angeles. Still, J.C. Satàn, Russian Red, Wolf Alice, and Inner Oceans lived up to the hype. L.A. bands did well too. Banks, Moses Sumney, and Youth Code were three of the most talked-about bands on the airplane home, which not only shows how good our scene is right now but also how diverse.
See you next year, Austin.
The above photo is ATX airport waiting for our luggage trying to sneak a photo of the entire staff of Jimmy Kimmel Live who were in town shooting the festival.
