Help us get to EuroSTAR!

In case you might not know, EuroSTAR is one of the biggest testing conferences in Europe today (btw. STAR stands for Software Testing Analysis & Review – this acronym was unknown to me too until I googled the conference 😛 ).

During the 4 days of the conference testers have the opportunity to attend workshops, watch presentations, or just mingle with the hundreds of testers present there, testers like Michael Bolton and Fiona Charles for instance. Actually, Ru attended the conference last year and from what I heard, she had a blast. She even shared her experiences here on the blog in a pretty awesome and unique way, if you ask me. Go ahead and check it out, I’ll wait. 🙂

Two years ago the EuroSTAR team came up with a novel idea: make a movie with three of your very awesome tester friends about how enthusiastic you are about testing, send it to them along with a photo of your team and a short introduction, win the hearts (read: votes) of the Eurostar community and attend the conference for free.

This year, some of us at Altom decided to do just that! Adina, Ale, Mihai and I sent out our application on the 28th of August. We even had two versions of the movie with different background music, and we decided on THE movie after a bunch of people voted for their favorite one. (thanks to everyone that voted!)

Here’s the version that won (only by a single vote, mind you):

It was a pretty fun movie to make, even though we ended up not using half of the things we filmed. For instance, we had a whole scene with us chatting over a huge watermelon that was totally cut from the final movie; but that’s okay, the watermelon was delicious either way. 😀

I have to say that Ale was the main driving force behind the movie, she came up with the idea that we ended up picking (a documentary style movie about a new species of humanlike testers), she did most of the filming, as well as a big part of the editing and “post-production”.

I mean we all chipped in and did our part, despite being in 2 separate locations for most of the time and having to synchronize our efforts and filming. We each wrote our introductions and interviews for the movie, Adina and Ale did all of the editing together, I wrote the movie introduction and the first draft of the narrator’s text. Mihai didn’t really have specific tasks during filming, but that’s OK; he is still part of the team.

I can’t speak for all of us, but I had a lot of fun doing this movie. Plus, I never thought that saying a single line “properly” would be so mind mindbogglingly difficult.

Oh and huge thanks to Ramona! The voice of the narrator is her’s, in case you were frightened wondering…

The euroSTAR team will decide on the top submissions and will post them on their forum on the 3rd of September. If we are chosen, we will have to “network” the poop out of this movie in order to win. 😛 We will have until the 16th of September to do this; and if we win, we will be heading to Amsterdam to attend the conference as well as a black tie Gala Awards show afterwards. We will share our experiences from the conference by making a 2 minute video diary each day while the conference lasts.

We will definitely be looking forward to an interesting experience, to say the least. 🙂