What is Mega?

Cincinnati has an incredible pool of talent in the entertainment and creative industries. I wanted to create an event that could bring all these like minded folks together in a bi-yearly event for networking a job creation.

How it got started.

2018 was a prime time to be a community organizer in the Cincinnati area. Startup culture was at its peak popularity in OTR, more communities would sprout up for their niche expertise and above all groups were getting large turn outs for all of the communities.

December is always a weird month for groups that meeting up once a month, especially those in a creative or development focused discipline. From an organizer standpoint you only really have those first two weeks of December if you want to get a meeting in. Well all the communities would do them on the same days and would result in split attendance.

I wanted to fix that.

I worked with community leaders from Voice Actors, Film Production, Motion Design, Animation, Virtual Reality, Game Development (me IGDA Cincinnati) etc etc to all meet in a single location and meet for the end of the year event.

So many times I’d go to a lets say a Film Production meeting and they need a motion designer, and then a motion design group needs a VO artist and then the VO group has desires to voice in a video game. Everyone was just a day apart of meeting everyone to get these projects going. That is what Mega was.

How did it go?

Mega was the absolute best it could be for the extremely low budget put towards it. We worked with a local restaurant to host the event on a slow day in December. We brought well over 70+ attendee (for the first and several Mega events later) The following groups were in attendance:

• IGDA Cincinnati

• Cincinnati Production Meetup

• Cincinnati Motion Group

• Cincinnati VR Meet Up

• Cincinnati Animation Network

• Cincinnati Film Society

• Black Cincinnati Cinema Collective

• Cincinnati Area VO Talent

The event was so successful we did it twice a year, December to wrap up the year with a celebration and June to get college students involved with a summer project and experience and connect those for future projects. In total I host 3 of these events. After everyone I had attendees message me or share on the group page that they were able to find that team they had been looking for, got a lead on a job\startup, or got that Coop they needed.