When we first saw the Carbon festival line up, we were pretty impressed – and now, having finished up the weekend, we have to say that it was a refreshing, unique and totally cool festival in terms of style, art, fashion, design, etc. What made it so successful?  The speakers? Raw data? Cool factor? Amazing and driven talent? A combination of all the above?

Well, we wont analyse it, but it was really the people that attended, organised and that spoke that made it such a good weekend. Our main thing was to test out our live blogging for the first time, and, of course,  get some insights from the best in the biz. We learnt some valuable lessons, such as to not leave a laptop in sleep mode over night thus having to spend the entire day live blogging off an iPhone, that Telstras new carrier settings for iPhone suck, and that I need a dedicated hand masseuse to alleviate my stiff fingers from so much damned typing (volunteers?) – all in all though, it was a fun experience.

 
So heres the whole live recap – we’ve tidied it up a little, but be aware that this is a live transcription – it aint perfect, and please forgive any inaccuracies. Speakers have also been paraphrased a bit, but as one kind commenter said “its the next best thing to being there!” Just click on the “replay” buttons below and you’ll get the whole transcripts that we did (on the fly from both  days … yes, I realise I’m obsessed with writing) – so enjoy!

Day One – was in ACMI. The Thursday night had a Josh Robenstone exhibition, and the opening party was in the Atrium – lots of pizza, lots of Grolsch, and an early night for the next day for us. The first panel on Saturday, Beyond The Brand, featured Bobby Hundreds (The Hundreds), Matt Thomas (Highs and Lows), Matt Noffs (Gideon) and Goldcoast & Dan Preston (Asuza) from Melbourne. The second panel, Building a T-Shirt Label, had Greg Rivera (Mishka, NYC), Jimmy Bliggs (Grand Scheme), Tristan Ceddia (Serps/Ksubi) and Carri Munden (Cassette Playa, UK).

Day Two – This was at the BMW atrium. Day two pretty much had four parts to it. When we first arrived, the Sneaker Freaker swapmeet was in full swing – and it was one of the largest we’ve seen yet. We then headed in to the first forum – Craftsmanship & Imagination, featuring Futura (NYC), Anthony Lister (Bris), Brett Chan (Syd) & Beci Orpin (syd). The final forum was The Art of Hype (my personal favourite) which had Noah Callahan-Bever (Complex. NYC), Frank Liew (Qubic, NZ), Chooee Hwang (streething.com, Sing) and Alexandra Weiland (Acclaim, Melb). Afterwards, for the final part of the day, Futura (NYC), Jasper Wong, Does, Sirum, MEGA here and there, Sofles and others.

• Pre-Carbon pics and post from Frank Liew over at Hypebeast of his visit over for the festival, also read the second and third part (which had some nice words about our liveblogging!) – heaps of good info on there and other links to run downs of the event,it sounds like he had a crazy cool weekend over here haha.
• Heres a few more pics of the live painting session on Dean Sunshines blog.
• Cool bit of blogging from Bobby Hundreds about his arrival and stay in Melbourne for the festival – andhere is a bunch of images of Futura doing some live painting.
• You can find a few more of our photos on our Facebook page.
• Great blog piece and pics from the girls at Just Another Agency on Day 2 here.
• Sneaker Freaker have a cool recap of the swapmeet as well as pics of all the live painting.
• .. and I’ll keep updating this as more images come out during the week …

 
MEGA also had his opening on the Saturday night – alas, we couldn’t attend the opening on the night, but we did see “That Guys” work all over the place the next day – amazing! At the end of the day, the live painting session had kicked off – or maybe it should be the live-paint & schmooze session? The chats, photos and drinks were in full swing, and we sure as hell met our fair share of really, really great people. If only we could have kicked on to the party afterwards – alas, we were exhausted, bed called, and Monday work was haunting me with visions of being slumped over my desk.

We’ll be running a lot more live blogging in future – as I said, it went well, but next time we’ll work on better photos for the live stream, iPhone cameras sucked with the glare in the BMW forum!

Thanks to Invurts Peach (Cholo), who put up with my occasional technology-fingercramp-overdrivebraindump-stresses and who helped with the live blogging for the weekend, and Lara, who got a bunch of great snaps for us of the Sneaker Freaker swapmeet and the live painting. Thanks to all the artists, creatives, sponsors, volunteers and people we met at the festival that made it into such a great weekend for everyone –  mostly, though, thanks to all the crew at Acclaim, kudos on a massively great job at putting on the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series of festivals – we’re already looking forward to next year!!

Check out the event details (as they were) on the Carbon website.