Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Scott. I'm the director of the DEF CON documentary.
And I'm Rachel Lovinger. I'm the co‑producer of this documentary.
So what we're going to do here is a breakdown of the creation of this thing, how we ended
up with this project in our hands, how we spent basically the last year and a half putting
it together and the resulting lessons we learned from it along with hopefully at the end maybe
a little bit of bonus footage and strange stuff that didn't get into the documentary
and or in some cases doesn't exist anywhere except for in this room.
So let's get started with the fun. You know, so basically what happened was like
last February I was on a trip with Rachel in Helsinki. She was doing a presentation
at a conference and I said, okay, I'm doing some documentaries of my own. I want to go
to. So we were in Helsinki and what you see there is my smallest documentary set up where
I have a tripod and something.
I have some equipment in a bag and it is frigging cold in Helsinki, enough that when I wanted
to interview people they would say, yeah, you're going to come here. I'm not going outside.
And so I was in the middle of it and we get this phone call and the phone call came from
Russ Rogers of DEF CON and through a Skype call I talked to him and he put forward this
interesting idea and he said, well, you know, we're coming up in the 20th DEF CON. And I
said, okay.
And he said, great. And he said, and we've been thinking we want to do a documentary
about it and I can think of no finer person than yourself. And I said, and he's like,
and we'll pay you.
Now I've been a attendee at DEF CON for basically since 1999. I gave a presentation there about
running textfiles.com, the website that I run, and I have progressively spoken pretty
much every year since then.
So I've been to many of the DEF CONs. I think I've only missed one. So I was a part of the
group. I knew what it was. But I was also well aware of the rule that there are no cameras
running around taking pictures of everybody and that they will be punched in the face.
So the problem here was, you know, we have this wonderful event and did I want to take
on that pain? And then Russ mentioned the money again.
And the funny part was I came up with a number of, like, all right, for this I'd do it. And
that was the number he offered, like, on the button. And I said, okay, you obviously know
me very well.
So I said, I think I shall do this. Now bearing in mind that at the time I was shooting three
other documentaries. So we'll talk about how I handled that. But, you know, I was busy.
It wasn't like, hooray, my first documentary. So I made two other documentaries that people
had seen, one called BBS, the documentary, which is about computerized bulletin board
systems. That one took four years, had 205 hours of footage, ended up being seven hours
split across eight episodes. And then Gitlamp, because I thought BBS was just way too general,
I made a high definition documentary about text adventures. And I went out and interviewed
people from InfoComm and that history. And that one took four years. That had 120 hours.
And it had gone out very well, went out in 2010. And so I had decided to do more. But
I had some experience with technical documentaries and making things about computer people and
getting people who weren't used to cameras to talk on the camera and so on. So I had
that experience. And I had done a kick starter. And, you know, so yeah, signed on, went for
it. But there were some fundamental issues that I wanted to know about.
The thing was that I knew my previous films had been about subjects that were general,
like text adventures. Well, I'll just talk to people about text adventures until I have
so much footage. I have a movie about it. And same thing with bulletin board systems.
But this was about a finite event that happens between four and five days, depending on how
you perceive it, in the middle of the summer in Las Vegas, and then never happens again.
Any moment you don't film is lost forever. And that's what I wanted to talk about. And
that's what I wanted to talk about. Which is an enormous amount of pressure and completely
different than how I make my films. So how the hell are we going to do that? How about
the fact that everyone doesn't want to be filmed? Nobody wants a piece of this. Traditionally
people have been driven away or whatever for doing sweeps, for screaming. There's been
many stories of people talking. One person talked about he was running a booth and how
he was talking to one of the goons and suddenly the goon turned and said, you will stop that.
And he was like, I'm not going to do that. And I was like, I'm not going to do that.
Who is he yelling at? And it was somebody up in one of the sky boxes in the old Riviera
aiming down at the booth. So they were pretty strict about let's not get with the cameras.
And now we were going to say let's film everything? So that was a bit of a nightmare to consider.
And finally, how do I make this not suck? How do I make a film that's not going to
look like something that G4 shit out in three days?
How am I going to do that? How am I going to bring something special to it?
How are we going to put a movie together? And originally it was I'm going to direct
this. And, again, I'm in Helsinki with Rachel and Rachel is like, I'm going to help you.
I know. But, you know, she said I'll help you do this and we'll approach it together
from the beginning. Like this wasn't where I got weird and then I said, what do I do?
From the beginning she said, oh, I want a piece of this, too. And I was like, oh, really?
Is this something you do? And then she reminded me that she also had a degree in film and
had done films. And, yeah, maybe she wants to help with this.
And finally, how do you do it in six months? Because they wanted me to release the film
on Christmas as a Christmas present to the gang. How am I going to shoot a film where
we have less than that to film, edit, and put it together?
So we ended up moving straight into ‑‑ .
So we're going to do planning. And I'm going to let Rachel describe her thought process
on how she started to bring this together for this unbelievably huge project.
Okay. So there's me in Helsinki. It was very cold, as Jason said. One of the reasons I
thought I could help out with this is I actually really like planning. I really like documentaries
and I like planning things. So this is an example of a spreadsheet that I made of a
lot of things. At my office at work, I show a documentary once a month. And my colleague
and I brainstormed the kind of documentaries that we want to show. We have a list of enough
documentaries we could show once a month for, like, seven years. We tracked, like,
which ones we've seen, what they're about, how long they are, all that kind of stuff.
Just to give you an example that, you know, I like planning things.
She really likes planning things. I've also been to DEF CON a few times before
that. So I kind of had some idea what to expect that I think was helpful. I've known Jason for a
long time. So that's his senior year high school yearbook photo. And I took that photo.
Yeah. If you go back just very quickly for this gang, so what do you pose with to show your
fine times in high school? Well, your Roger Waters Radio Chaos album. If you look in the upper
left, you can see my figment cap from when they used to sell those in Epcot Center. A stolen
highway flasher. A stolen pay phone. Just there, just evidence thrown into my high school
yearbook photo. And then, of course, holding in my hand a lineman's test set. So this is
basically an evidence photo. And a dust buster. Oh, and the dust buster.
Because every single photo, there's five photos of me in the high school yearbook, and in each
one I'm holding a dust buster. Why? Because I could.
We had a very permissive high school. So the first question that we set out to tackle
was how are we going to film all of this in this constrained period of time. And, of
course, we realized there's no way that just between the two of us we could film everything.
We need to bring on some additional people to have multiple cameras in multiple places.
So Jason mentioned he had this kick starter. He put out a call to his kick starter backers.
Yeah. So the kick starter backers thing. So here I made this thing called the Jason Scott
documentary three pack. I'm going to make three documentaries. Will you fund it? And
I remember that kick starter gave me shit at the time. They were like, you're asking
for $100,000. You're not going to get that. And also, you don't have any rewards under
$100. And I was like, well, my counteroffer is I'm changing nothing.
Yeah.
And we're going to put it up anyway. And it got 40 grand in 24 hours. So I knew my
audience. And I have a very strong connection to this audience. They know I work hard on
these films. They know why I want to make them and what I'm about. And I felt very
bad that I might take on this other film. So I turned it around and said instead, guess
what, you get another film for the amount of money you put in. And you're going to get
some advance notice of some of the pieces in it and everything else. So I had to turn
it around and say, actually, this is a good thing. Plus I get more practice and in some
ways I get more equipment that will help. So that was how I mitigated it. People were
basically excited. Is this where I mentioned the recruitment?
Yeah.
So what I did was I said, I need crew. If you were supporting a Jason Scott documentary,
do you want to make one with him? And a bunch of people said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no. People jumped forward and said, sure, with no information. Yes, I will do this.
You basically told them, we will fly you out there and it's a shit ton of work.
I didn't even tell them that. I just told them it was a shit ton of work. I didn't make
it clear we were going to pay for anything. I didn't want somebody treating it as a free
trip to Vegas. So I just said, oh, we're going to shoot. You want in? And we had I
think eight people sign up. And I turned it around and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no. I chose what ended up being, I believe, five. And I had one person bow out because
of work commitment. No hard feelings with him. And so I ended up with four people from
my kick starter group who had ‑‑ who literally the way I met them in a few cases
was when they flew here. Anyway, that's how we handled that.
We'll come back to them, too.
Yeah, we will.
So once we knew we would have multiple people filming, we said, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no. We started trying to figure out, okay, what are all the things that we want to cover.
So we sort of poured through the schedule. We knew we weren't going to focus so much
on filming all the talks. A lot of those are filmed anyway. So we, you know, what was
actually more helpful was looking through the forums where we got information about
all of the parties and the contests and the events and the unofficial as well as the official
events and where they were going to be and when they were starting. And that was incredibly
useful.
Anybody who uses DEF CON or goes to DEF CON, I'm sure you know this, right, is there's
just places you go to and there's places you walk by and you hear someone say, I'm doing
an Easter egg contest. And you're like, well, good for you. And you don't do it. Or you
go, shit, yeah. And there's so many people for whom DEF CON is a very limited experience.
And so we suddenly had to become the omniscient awareness pack of all aspects of DEF CON 20,
everything from, like, how do they set up the video? How do they set up the video? How
do they set up the rooms through to every event that was even peripherally being planned
in the forums? Because some of them are very, very liquid in the beginning. Like, I'm thinking
of doing a thing and I think I got someone to tell me it was okay. And we're like, well,
got to get them on the list. All right, guy with thing, you may be a movie star soon.
So that was a very strange experience to pull that much together.
So we pulled that all together into this, again, a spreadsheet. And we, you know, we,
we captured, you know, what things were happening, when and where they were going to be, and
tried to sort of sketch out what are the things that we think we want to film about this event
to sort of ‑‑ in order to tell that story. And some of these are going to be things
that are going to be happening all weekend. So, you know, we know, like, okay, we want
to be there when Jeff explains what the tamper evident contest is.
This thing is a fantastic document. This is Rachel's work. And part of her professional
job is constructing data in a way that makes sense.
And understanding the underlying pieces of it. And she's very good at it. And so, we
had a real gift here. Because if you look at it, there's a color coding to indicate
will we get in trouble if this is not filmed down to if the camera swings across it, everything's
good. And then followed by what's the narrative?
What do we think the narrative is? Like, what's the narrative of the toxic barbecue?
What do we think the story that needs to be told about a speaker is? And then followed
by who do we think ‑‑ are the speakers? Who do we think ‑‑ who do we think are
the players in the story? Do we know who the organizers are? Do we know who the big
people are? And then finally notes where I write, I don't understand anything. And everything
else on the side. And this goes on ‑‑ we only have one slide, but it goes on for
like a dozen pages at least. It's a huge, massive document.
And there's also ‑‑ you know, it highlighted things that we didn't know and then we would
reach out to Pyro or reach out to Russ or ask people, okay, what's going on with this?
Is the beard contest happening this week, et cetera?
Yeah. So that's how we found out things like the cannonball run wasn't happening.
And other times we would, like, get surprised and find out something was happening that
we didn't know. But we were really ‑‑ this was our secret weapon. You know, one of the
secret weapons is this ‑‑ like, where is the work? It's like, well, here it was.
Here was months of screaming work trying to track down who's this, who's this, who's this.
And what is it? So we had, if you want to say, the Bible that DEFCON doesn't have as
to what DEFCON is as a reference document.
The Encyclopedia of DEFCON.
So that got us about as prepared as we could about the events. The next question we tried
to tackle is how are we going to film everyone ‑‑ you know, film an audience of people
that doesn't necessarily want to be filmed or hasn't traditionally want to be filmed.
And we went through a number of ideas. I think one thing ‑‑ we had an idea at
one point to, like, give out paper masks.
Yeah, we were going to give out ‑‑ we proposed things ‑‑ one of them was maybe
a paper mask.
With, at the point, anonymous. Or another one that people could hold up when the cameras
went by. And the response from the goons was no fucking way are you going to give 15,000
people masks.
So instead we decided just to make ourselves really identifiable and that anyone would
be able to see us coming and could get out of the way or kind of indicate they weren't
interested. So our first idea was we'd get everyone orange jumpsuits. And then we quickly
realized that ‑‑
103 degrees plus jumpsuits equals we have three crew members at the end.
Yeah, and everyone running around all day in these, we didn't want to kill the volunteers.
So we went instead with these nice light mesh orange vests. Well, Jason will show off
here.
They have lots of nice pockets in them for carrying things. And we spray painted the
logo and the word documentary on them so there would be no question that, you know, who we
were.
And the side benefit of this was that we were really easy to spot by each other. So
if we were, like, we're looking for one of our crew members, we could always find them.
And you'll see them throughout the film, actually.
To this day, I will see people in these and go, I wonder what they're filming.
And then we entered the real official preproduction stage. So I want to call out here to Russ Rogers. Jason mentioned him.
Russ called him. But he was also really our, like, primary liaison. So Russ and Dark Tangent
were our co‑executive producers. But Russ was the guy, like, our day‑to‑day contact
if we needed anything from the conference, if we had any questions beforehand while
we were here, he was our guy.
Yeah.
Russ and I talked ‑‑ when all was said and done, I think Russ and I talked for roughly
between 100 and 200 hours over the past 18 months. Just overnight.
Over time. I mean, he was there every time to give me heads up, to tell me something's
going on, to get back to me on every aspect. I mean, he ‑‑ you know, this isn't something
where it says executive producer and that means they wrote the check. It's literally
this guy was working on it equally as hard as me, especially some months, especially
as we started to move towards where is this thing going to end up and how are we going
to publish it. He was right there.
So he's not here right now.
Right now, I don't think. But believe me, he was a ‑‑ he was as critical as any
other component, this guy.
So then we had our crew. So we want to introduce you to them. These are the six guys and then
Jason and myself. These are actually the photos that we sent to the goons, the security goons.
So in addition to having our vests, they wanted to make sure that they knew what all of our
crew looked like so nobody could impersonate them.
So there wouldn't be documentary crew within six hours of the talk.
But there's a documentary crew being there running around roughshod.
I don't think anyone tried to impersonate us, though.
No.
That I know of.
No, we were not. I don't believe anybody actually impersonated us. We were confused
with people once because ‑‑ and somebody with an orange shirt was kind of a dick.
And somebody was like, the documentary crew is harassing me and it was like, no, they
don't have the time to harass anybody. And I mentioned this to one of the goons. And
they said, welcome to our world and everyone who has a right, right, right. And I said,
red shirt.
So we actually ‑‑ I looked back on it.
We gave them shockingly little preparation for what they were going to experience at
DEF CON, especially considering most of them had never been to DEF CON and now we're asking
them to cover everything about it.
One thing we did ask them was to watch Morgan Spurlock's Comic-Con documentary had recently
come out, and not for the same topics exactly and not even the same story arc, but we knew
like this was a good example of what it's like to try to capture on film an event with
massive amounts of people and tons of things going on at once.
So we said watch that and you'll have a little sense of what you're in for.
And then aside from that, we just wanted them to be comfortable and safe.
Yeah.
And I do say ‑‑ I had met Morgan Spurlock at a conference.
And so we recognized each other and then he was at a presentation of Comic-Con episode
four.
And we went there.
And so I watched it like, oh, somebody did sort of the same thing I want to do.
And we watched it.
And afterwards his two producers and himself were there.
And I actually asked them a lot of way too technical questions personally, like when
they were just chatting, not Q&A and I have a question, please teach me how to film.
But, you know, I did ‑‑
I did get some hints from him and what they were shooting for and they did open my mind.
They came up with some ideas that they never had work and I just want to mention one because
it was kind of brilliant.
He wanted to ‑‑ so they do a more story arc thing than I would ever do where they
would actually went out, they got 20 ‑‑ they had applicants send in a recording of
I'm going to be at Comic-Con and here is my story.
And then they chose like the eight or nine most compelling stories and then sent crews
and then they ended up using four of them or three of them.
And what they wanted to do, if you know Comic-Con, it's got this massive, you know, many, many
thousands of square feet floor.
It's like three football fields long.
Yeah, massive thing.
He wanted a Super Bowl cam and what he wanted to do was as a transition, you would be following
someone's story, they would walk out on the floor and a camera would pile back from them
and zoom down Comic-Con's floor and then follow the next person as a transition.
And when he got there, they were like ‑‑ Oh.
No.
No.
There's no line of sight anywhere in the Comic-Con floor that does that.
He could have done that with drones, I bet.
Yes.
That's exactly the next thing they want is helicopter drones flying over people.
With massive banners so it just looks like Star Wars episode four trench scene.
Nice.
But anyway, so he was thinking out of the box, too, of like how do I make this exciting?
And it was very ‑‑ it was very inspiring.
So thanks, Morgan.
We also had ‑‑ we had in our pocket one ringer, which was one of the people on our
crew, Eddie Codell.
He is a professional as well and he's done a lot of work with Boing Boing TV and Maker
Bot TV and he's filmed at Comic-Con and at South by Southwest.
So he's kind of familiar with being dropped into these kind of crazy situations and being
able to handle it.
We wanted to know we had a clutch just in case.
Just in case it got really hot because there were so many unknowns.
We want to know we can send a guy in who has filmed these things, who's going to hold the
camera steady, who's going to follow what's going on, and we don't have to worry.
So if we really need footage and we're scared and everyone's falling apart, we know Eddie
will at least barrel through.
So that was just us taking a little precaution for the good and I insisted he be paid at
close to his regular rate and treated like this was a perfect ‑‑ not perfect.
But hey, buddy, come in and do hard work for free because DEF CON.
I think we still made him sleep on the floor.
We did.
Okay.
So that's the fourth day.
I'm a little tired.
Eddie is here.
All right.
So let's ‑‑ why don't you tell them about the equipment.
Yeah.
So, you know, where are you going to go about when you're putting this thing together?
And you know, a lot of people when they see a movie there's a certain range of people
whose response is, well, now tell me exactly every last piece of equipment you used to
make this film.
Yeah.
Because that's kind of what we all like to do.
I know a number of filmmakers who also make geek documentaries and after I got my kick
starter money I sat down with them, Paul of Two Player Productions who are the ones doing
the Double Fine documentary right now but they've also done Mojang, the story of Minecraft.
They've also done the 8‑bit movie about chiptune artists and I also have become really
good friends with James.
Who are the creators of Indie Game, the movie and I basically did a con call with James
and Paul and said, your camera, what is it?
And they tell me, your sound, what was it?
How did you get this shot?
What lens did you buy?
And so shopping list, shopping list, shopping list, shopping list and I bought everything
they had.
So I had some really good stuff like the cannons and I had some really good lenses and everything
else.
Now, just to explain what we're going about here.
So the problem was is that the best camera to shoot with is the Cannon 5D Mark II.
I don't mean in life, I'm not going to play that fucking game, I hate that game.
But it's the camera I found would produce really good footage under a certain circumstance.
But the body is like 4,000 and the lenses are thousands.
So I had one because I got it for my movie.
But I knew we were going to have three crews and I couldn't be giving away three Cannon
5Ds.
Plus they're really weird to work with.
And so we settled on something called a Vixia, which I'll show you more of in a moment.
And so we basically had Rachel had a Cannon, I had a Cannon 5D, I had a 5D.
And then we had three Vixias.
And then we also, this was one of our ideas, was let's get little play sports.
And so what you see there in the center, there's an orange one and two black ones,
was let's get play sports.
Yeah.
And give them to people at the con and get other footage and see what comes of that.
With the hope that we would get something utterly disgusting.
Something horrifying where there would be a moment where you were like, is it more of
a crime that it can be seen and not just vaguely remembered and drank away?
Is it terrible?
Yeah.
And we didn't know, you know, and of course we figured they'd come back and they would
have been destroyed or someone would never come back with them or whatever.
But we got 11 of them, just in case.
And they were very cheap.
We got them on special.
They were under 100 bucks.
They're waterproof.
They shoot in high definition.
They can take shock and dust.
They're just tough little bastards.
And we figured, okay, this one will, you know, they'll survive and we'll see how much footage
we get from them.
So that was like our little secret sauce wild card.
Like, you know, as opposed to the documentary crew running.
Obviously we'll still respect people and we wanted shots that were evocative and people
might have, but we didn't want to lose crew for like six hours if somebody went on a road
trip.
And this also, I mean, this lets us be in places where we would never know to be, you
know, if we give them out to people.
We gave them to like some goons, some long time attendees and like some of the people
that were competing in like the scavenger hunt and some of the other contests.
Where we just couldn't be with them all the time.
Right.
So we ended up with, you know, a bunch of these cameras and obviously the lenses and
other pieces.
And it was all going to be filmed on digital.
There's no analog in here.
There's no video tape in here.
There's no anything like that.
We also have Zoom H4N recorders, which are my favorite recorders.
They're little guys.
They're really tough as well.
And you could do recording with them in all sorts of circumstances and they go right to
MP3.
When we ‑‑ let's look at the next one.
Here's the set up that we ended up going for or a variation of it.
What this is, this is me at another convention.
This is me at a comic book grouping in New York City to test this.
I just ran around with it filming.
And we have a monopod sitting on these little Canon Vixia G10s that also film high definition.
And here I've got an extended microphone and I'm storing the item in my pocket.
We ended up just getting rid of and slimming down.
And getting rid of the external microphone and using the internal microphone and just
having our guys put the microphone right here and try not to get in the shot.
And that actually worked out spectacularly well.
So what you see there is a set up that is infinitely portable, is really fast to set
up, can get anywhere, takes really good shots, and can deal with the action in just a really,
really intense way.
So it turned out to be a really nice combination.
We had three of these going at any given time.
So with that, we kind of said, okay, well, or I should really say Rachel said, we should
have a presence online.
Let's get people excited.
Isn't that what you do with a campaign?
Let's build up a here's what's going on, let's make a Facebook group.
Let's do a Twitter stream.
Let's let people know what's going on and build a YouTube channel.
Let's build a presence for the DEF CON documentary in anticipation.
And there's a very interesting thing about that, which is that nobody gives a shit about
DEF CON until like a month before.
Like, a few people do, a few insiders do, but on the general, nobody's like, better
check the Twitter stream, better check the Twitter stream.
They don't start getting excited until right before.
And we had a lot of conflict internally between us about this because we, you know, she's
like, we should treat this well.
And I'm like, but nobody's giving a shit and we're not getting responses and I'd rather
focus on this and this.
So we had a lot of conflict.
And it just turns out for anybody who's doing anything like this again or any kind of deal,
it's just DEF CON is something that people put a lot of energy on, but they put a lot
of energy either on their projects or they put a lot of energy towards learning about
it in anticipation, like a few weeks before to get more info.
So it's better to, like, back load your stuff and have it ready to go and start dropping
hints like a week or two before or three weeks before.
You know, work on it.
Do your projects.
But they don't really start paying attention to, like, day by day reloading what's going
on until just before.
That was a hard one lesson.
We wasted a little bit of energy on that.
All right.
I think ‑‑ so then we get to production.
Right.
I think I do production, too.
Here you go.
Huh.
How do you capture the spirit of DEF CON, past and present, says the slide.
So my concern was this.
Um.
Like, in capturing ‑‑ like I said, first of all, no G4 crap.
Second of all, I wasn't overly interested in doing a what I was going to call sparky
goes to DEF CON story, right, where I find some kid, it's his first DEF CON, I go to
his house, find out his mom and dad are still married, and then he likes computers and he
has one in his house, and then he's going to go to DEF CON where he will be found naked
floating down with the bubble stopping sometime on the second day.
I just wasn't interested in that.
In that narrative, right?
And it, like, forces ‑‑ I mean, it's a perfectly valid narrative, right, to do
that and do a story that way.
But I didn't think I wanted to do that.
I wasn't comfortable with that.
What I wanted to do was have authoritative voices in a mosaic discussing what DEF CON
means to them, and then the best we can, illustrate all of that in the material over
the course of the next ‑‑ you know, the course of the movie.
And there was another mystery factor.
And I know the joke, which was, what if DEF CON gets canceled?
And it was, you know, and it could be ‑‑ there's ways to be canceled without being canceled,
right?
I mean, hotel gets smoke bombed.
There's a problem.
Because of something, there's nobody able to attend the talks in the same way.
They run into a security issue.
There might not be a DEF CON to film.
And I ‑‑ and that would be an interesting story.
Right?
DEF CON.
DEF CON is canceled.
And just credits, organ music, a 17‑minute movie.
And so I was worried.
And so I front loaded with as many interviews as I could handle, especially of staff that
I knew would be balls to the wall.
So what you're seeing here is one of my setups.
This is in a hotel at Hope.
And Hope really appreciated that I was filming a DEF CON documentary at Hope.
I was like, yeah, I'm filming some people for a DEF CON documentary.
I was able to do one thing.
We were able to fly in Dead Addict because he lives in Toronto and I wanted to be able
to film him, but I didn't want to go to Toronto to film him.
So I brought him to New York.
So for the first time, one of the only ‑‑ one of four people who have been to every DEF
CON got to go to Hope for the first time because he never got a chance to go before.
So that was kind of nice.
And we're filming in the hotel room I got for him.
So it was a, you know, reuse.
And I filmed interviews with Dual Core and Deviant Olym and Dead Addict at Hope and was
able to use this kind of a setup.
And this is my setup.
So you can see my Canon.
You can see how I use a boom mic.
And then I like to use halogen lights and really flood the room with light and bounce
it off.
I mean, this is a shitty hotel room, let's be clear.
The Hotel Pennsylvania is one of the worst pieces of property in an urban area outside
of a fire bombing or World War II.
But I was able to get some mileage out of moving it.
If you've seen The Shining, it feels a lot like ‑‑
It feels exactly like The Shining.
Shining plus ass rape.
Anyway, so ‑‑
All right.
Move ‑‑ yeah.
So like here's me filming Jeff.
And this is like kind of how I would do this.
So here's me.
I'm filming him, aiming it at his desk.
This is one of only two locations we could use.
The other one was truly unusable.
This one had an echo.
But I filmed him randomly.
Okay.
Okay.
So I went to Seattle.
I went to Los Angeles.
I went to Colorado, Denver area.
And I went to a couple of houses in California and a couple houses on the east coast and
Washington, D.C.
And basically did about 50 interviews with people that made it into the movie in some
cases.
In some cases didn't get into the movie.
And so they're all filmed under different circumstances.
Hackerspaces like DenHack.
And 23.
And Black Lodge up in Seattle.
They opened up their spaces to me and then would have their members come over and one
by one I'd interview them and just do these interviews and try to do my best to make them
all interesting locations.
And by the time I was done, before DEF CON, before minute one of DEF CON had started,
I had roughly ‑‑ I want to say between 30 and 40 hours of DEF CON footage.
About DEF CON.
And seeing your staff, explaining why DEF CON meant things to them, what it was about and
everything.
So I knew I wouldn't have to track those people down.
And then there were people who used to be part of DEF CON and are never going back again
or rarely go back.
Like Death Vegetable and Swamp Rat and other people.
I wanted their voices in this thing even though I knew they weren't attending.
So this was a real ‑‑ this was part of the hard work.
It took me about 60 days to get flown around and do these interviews.
So I knew coming in I was preloaded.
So if it all blew up, I could have all of this and then say, ironically, it never happened.
But the thing is, is that the first documentary I did, the BBS documentary, has a lot of
talking heads.
And, yeah, they're weaved well and I worked really hard on it.
But it is talking heads.
And the same thing with Gitlamp.
A lot of talking heads and then a lot of illustrations of games.
And I knew that I wanted this film to be kinetic.
I wanted it that you were seeing things happen.
That there was motion.
That DEF CON is a thing of motion and activity and throngs and people moving around.
And so I resolved that even though I had 30 or 40 hours of people sitting telling you
DEF CON is awesome, I couldn't see by Saturday, it is fantastic, I wanted it that you would
see somebody blind drunk on Saturday or see that people were working hard or soldering.
And so that was on my ‑‑ that was on my list.
To make sure that it would have that feeling.
All right.
So ‑‑
And we ‑‑
Yep.
So that was all in the lead‑up time to DEF CON.
And then finally last July we assembled our whole crew at DEF CON.
There we are.
Yeah, that's a pretty ‑‑ I love that shot.
With our fearless leader.
Fearless leader and Wendy lady and the lost boys.
And this is us all assembling.
We all have our outfits.
We are an army.
Mm‑hmm.
Mm‑hmm.
It's a great shot.
So it's everywhere.
Because it just really captures it.
Oh, yeah.
What's up with the fucking segue, Jason?
So I've been known for having a segue in previous years because I like segues.
And I discovered or I realized that we were going to have situations where we'd be over
here in track three and then something would happen in Penn and Teller and I'd have to
go there.
And so I'm like, I'm going to get a segue so I can get from one to the other really
quickly.
Because we don't know if we were going to get radios and we wouldn't know if we were
going to get communication.
So the segue became the catch‑all solution.
Okay.
So we got here.
We checked all our equipment.
We had a couple hotel rooms.
One of them became our sort of HQ, our production HQ.
And we made sure everything was there, made sure it was all working.
We ‑‑ before the conference started, we took our crew around.
We did like a walk‑through of the space to show them where everything was going to
be.
And we had them take the equipment with them and kind of, you know, test it out and get
comfortable with it and, you know, be able to ask some questions and stuff like that.
So we did a whole walk‑through of this area.
I think that was really helpful.
We did like a sort of a boot camp, but, you know, mostly it was just to, again, make sure
that we're going to be safe and comfortable and bring the footage back to us each day
and that sort of thing.
Okay.
So the conference lent us a bunch of things, some walkie‑talkies, which ended up being
a little ‑‑ you don't really want to keep walkie‑talkies on while you're filming
because you don't want someone suddenly, like ‑‑
Do we even know where room four is?
Yeah.
That can kind of screw up the footage.
So these ended up being of limited use to us, mostly just because we didn't want it
screwing up our shots.
I seem to have some vague memory of us doing something really enjoyable with those radios,
like some sort of message.
I'm now forgetting.
I don't know if I remember.
Yeah.
We mostly used them to prank each other.
Yeah.
We were just fucking with each other.
So we ended up going, like, does anyone even know where Kyle is?
Kyle here.
You don't need to find me.
They lent us a printer and, of course, the hotel rooms and stuff like that.
Yeah.
The hotel rooms came from DEF CON himself, not even in the budget, and that was really
appreciated.
We had a couple hotel rooms.
I think we had three.
Yeah.
Three hotel rooms to put our staff in and have as a thing.
Yeah.
So we went out and bought some supplies.
We got a lot of water and caffeine and food and Post-It notes and things like that.
And this is how I learned that if you go to two different pharmacies or drugstores in
Las Vegas and spend about $100 at each one, sometimes your bank turns off your credit
card for no good reason.
That was awkward.
Then we had our production meetings in the HQ every day, our room.
And this is where ‑‑ so, you know, we had our big list of all the things that we're
going on.
And we had assembled our crew into two ‑‑ three pairs of two people.
So we'd have one person ‑‑ and we actually figured this out during the boot camp, sort
of like who liked doing ‑‑ using the camera, who liked doing audio.
We figured out who was a morning person, who was a night person, and we kind of paired
them up, like we paired up morning people together.
And we had three groups of one cameraman and one audio recorder.
And we ‑‑ Colors.
Yes.
We nicknamed them team red, green, and blue.
And each ‑‑ you know, when we knew what things needed to be filmed each day, we wanted
to make sure, like, you know, is this something you're going to be interested in?
So that we would kind of go through, okay, here are the things that are happening tomorrow.
Who wants to film this?
And then we would make up these shot lists for each day so they knew, like, okay, at
10 o'clock this is happening and where it's happening.
And then we had a bunch of things that were, like, you know, at some point go by the hardware
hacking village.
That sort of thing.
So there were things that happened at a certain time and things that were just happening all
day.
But they all had their lists.
And then we had, like, the master list on the wall, which we had every event that was
going on up there.
And by the end of the day we'd kind of check off all the ones that we had gotten coverage
of.
And if we had ones that hadn't gotten covered but they were continuing the next day, we'd
just move those over to the next day.
Yeah.
We had team red, team green, team blue.
Yeah.
We renamed red team breaking bald.
So that's what their name became after a while because it was two bald guys.
And we paired up our least experienced member with our most experienced member.
So it was Alex who had not been in Vegas, been to DEFCON or done any shooting up with
Eddie who had done all of that with the idea being that it would balance out to a reasonably
talented person.
And actually, you know, I mean, obviously like everything else, you know, Alex learned
really quickly.
And Eddie worked with Alex and it went pretty well.
And then the other teams, they really worked well.
Team breaking bald turned out to be a real gift because these guys were getting up at
8 and they would go to bed at 2 or 3 over and over.
And Steve on that team, the camera guy, would just film endless establishing shots of everything.
So if you picked up the groceries, he would film the bag.
You grabbing the groceries.
You holding the groceries.
The groceries.
The groceries in the fridge.
The fridge.
The house the fridge is in.
The sun.
And the town.
And then the factory the fridge was manufactured in.
And that was a real gift to me down the line because I would have someone talk in the editing
room and I would be like, do I have a shot?
Of course I have a shot of that.
Because there was just shots of room, shots of people, shots of stuff.
So each team started to take on a character of what they wanted to do.
And it just kind of organically, that part was organic.
But as you can see, thanks to Rachel's planning, there was a lot that was not organic.
Like I'm a real improviser.
I don't come in with preformed questions for interviews.
And yet here, you know, it was like, what is everyone doing?
And we knew.
As opposed to, you should just walk out again and shoot things and come back.
So that's, you know, just for people who see this movie, I'm fractally pulling in.
But I'm just saying when people see this movie and they see the stuff, they're like, wow.
It's because she did this amazing matrix of all these items of stuff so that we were always
aware of what we needed.
And that's the real secret hard work that's not obvious on the screen.
It's not just, oh, they filmed until they made a movie.
It's like that's what was really there.
So unfortunately, yes, there is no secret get movie quick scheme.
So we also ‑‑ another part of our HQ, this was sort of like our information hub.
Every time the guys dropped off their cards, their memory cards, we copied them onto multiple
hard drives to make sure we had many copies of it and nothing would get lost.
Yeah, we had three hard drives.
Every piece of footage went on three hard drives.
And then when we got it home, we put them in six hard drives in three locations.
To verify that we would never lose the footage due to a hard drive going south.
And just to understand like how much space these things have, the cameras, the Vixia's,
had two 32 gig cards in them and they could record 25 hours of high definition video without
having to be swapped out.
And the audio could do 36 hours of full audio before having to be swapped out.
So even though we did it every day.
We didn't have situations where people were like, I'm out of film.
So we really, really over engineered that part.
That part turned out to be really good.
All right.
Then we finally started filming.
You know, the gang was set out on this really strange journey, right?
These guys were put out into this thing.
For some of them, they had never been to Vegas before.
For some of them, they had never been to DEF CON before.
And it is really strange to experience DEF CON in God mode, where you have essentially
carte blanche to walk into anything.
It was a really bizarre experience for me, especially because I had been there.
But for the others, they hadn't even been there.
So it was like, you know, try to imagine you walk into a room and people are talking and
you're like, well, I think I'll just go on stage.
Yeah, this needs me.
And I'm going to go sit behind this person and film the back of their head because I
feel like it.
And then that guy.
Oh, he's interesting.
He's leaving.
I'll follow him like a creeper until he goes into the hallway and, oh, it's this thing.
Oh, the goon security center.
Sure, let's hop in there.
Let's go talk to them.
What the hell?
And so that was like a massive emotional thing for me.
But for the others, it was like, okay, I guess I'm going to film this part.
You know, they were able to film inside and outside.
They didn't ‑‑ like here's an example of unused footage.
We filmed Scotland at the Toxic Barbecue.
But you can see here.
You can hear how the setup might be where they would set up the camera, they're listening
to what's going on, and then they're talking to Scotland about the Toxic Barbecue.
And so these little setups were everywhere.
For me, I ran into an additional bonus, which was I started filming from the Segway.
What this did was this afforded me crane shots to give me the kinetic energy that I wanted
in the shots.
And the film is loaded with these.
These are post‑processed.
Yeah.
Stabilized crane shots shot all over.
And I'm wearing a hat because I tried to make myself even more obvious.
Like I see a weird cowboy hat and bright orange and what the hell, oh, God, it's the
camera guy.
And you know, looking back, I probably should have also had a Steadicam Merlin, which was
a weight‑balanced thing, but I didn't do that.
I would just be driving along and literally go like this, go around people, and then keep
going.
And that Segway gave me enormous ability.
There's a scene you'll see in the movie where it goes around ‑‑ it goes around the speaker
party on the roof, and you see me just zooming through people like I'm on some sort of weird
rails, like right by people's heads.
And I only ran over one person the whole con, which was really amazing.
I was really surprised.
Only once.
And it was his fault because he had his ‑‑ he was sitting on his ‑‑ on the front row
with his feet.
His feet like way, way, way out, and it was dark.
And I flew over, and he yelled, and I gave him a red card and kept going.
And ‑‑ don't touch my Segway.
And anyway, that turned out to be a very ‑‑ besides being a good transport mechanism,
it turned out to be a really good filming mechanism.
So it really added to the film.
I guess I'll mention here, I believe in tone poems, which is where you look at pieces of
work.
Why do I feel this when I look at it?
How do I create this?
And how do I get that feel?
And for me, believe it or not, a lot of the tone poem for the movie for me comes from
action scenes in Sherlock Holmes 2, Game of Shadows.
And if you watch that film, if you watch the forest scene, if you watch the fight at
the end, a lot of the kinetic ‑‑ a lot of the kinetic sense of that movie, I wanted
this to have.
And so I used that as a template, kind of a rough feeling of what it would feel like
to go through DEFCON.
So the Segway helped a lot.
The crew went everywhere.
And they weren't afraid to go everywhere.
And in a lot of different shots, you will see them, because one crew will catch another
by mistake, because they're moving around so much.
So you can see here just all these different ‑‑ yeah.
Cases where they're filming.
And this is in many cases ‑‑ these are screen shots from other team members catching
other team members on the way.
And I watched great improvement ‑‑ I keep making the joke about Kyle, because in
the beginning Kyle is like, could you please ‑‑ would it be possible to interview you to talk
about the DEFCON documentary?
And I'd like to understand you working on this.
And by Saturday, he's like, yo, sup, what's this thing?
And people are just being ‑‑ yes, I'm working on this.
This thing.
And so by the end, they are like an unstoppable information gathering force, like a news program
on steroids, just slamming through this place to get all the info.
And just, you know, sometimes just miracles of, like, stepping in and getting a perfect
shot of this event happening, like perfectly framed, beautiful.
And so Jason mentioned, like, we had some team that was more in the morning and some
more in the evening.
But really, everybody was shooting.
Like, we were working from 8 o'clock in the morning until sometimes 2 o'clock in the morning.
Then we would go back to the room and have our, you know, debrief and production and
planning for the next day.
So I think we got probably roughly, like, three or four hours of sleep a night.
Right.
And one of the things I ‑‑ I mean, I was very strong about treating the crew with
as much respect as possible.
So again, we paid for the flights in.
So nobody is putting any money in.
And I insisted that we go on a really nice dinner the night before DEF CON started.
So we went to the Italian place here to talk more, but just mostly to let them have whatever
they want on the menu, because I knew they were going to get terrible sleep and terrible
eating.
And I wanted them to have a memory of at least, oh, yeah, Las Vegas was kind of fun once,
while they're stuck on the ground trying to get this one shot of somebody talking.
I was happy once.
I'll be happy again.
So I ‑‑ you know, because, again, this is the first time I have people working for
me in this capacity.
And I can do whatever I want to to myself.
You know, I used to do ‑‑ I had filmed things where I'd go a thousand miles in four
days.
And that's fine.
There's only one guy getting punched in the face from that, but I am punching people in
the face by doing this.
And I wanted them to know I respected them as people.
They're not just for hire machines that I can run into the ground and then drop back
in the recycling bin when I'm done.
They worked very hard.
Yeah.
Really hard.
This is my lovely Alex falling asleep during an interview.
And it's very adorable because if you listen to the footage, they're like, did we wake
him?
Nah, just keep talking.
Again, this was my ‑‑ this was Alex's first time in Las Vegas.
And Alex is 18.
And so he would finish ‑‑
Yeah.
A day at 2 in the morning and then go back out again.
So that's what you do when you're 18.
Because why not?
And so it wrecked him a few times.
But he definitely has work to show for it.
Beautiful work.
It's just ‑‑ it was rough on him.
So yeah.
This is one of my favorite shots of him.
You just want to hug him.
And so, you know, we had a lot of really impressive response and places that we were
going.
This is from the DEF CON kids sequence.
And the crew would always make sure to get, like, some really nicely framed interviews
and do interviews like I had done to seamlessly fit them in and record them under all sorts
of circumstances.
So what you're ‑‑ you know, what would happen is it wasn't just here's some people
talking and here's a shot of a key and here's a shot of a room door.
It was also sitting down and interviewing them straight up with the same approach that
I was trying to get them to.
Like, why are you here?
What does DEF CON mean to you?
What's a funny story?
And so here, like these kids, they're explaining what work they're doing on the badge.
And so there's a lot of stories that are not just mine.
I would estimate something like 70 to 100 interviews that came back from the footage.
And of course, we really liked shooting outside.
I didn't think it needed to be ‑‑ and, you know, this was funny because this is one
where Kyle got lost.
I believe.
Right?
No.
Was it the other one?
No.
It was ‑‑ he didn't get lost going there.
He got lost one ‑‑ they arrived back here and he was trying to find the parking lot.
And going around Las Vegas was the problem.
Right.
He took a wrong turn with the rental car and showed up like an hour and a half later
with the haunted face of a Vietnam vet.
And I was prepared to let him have the rest of the day off.
Like I was like, if he comes back and he's ‑‑ let him rest.
And we'll just work with ‑‑ Then he turned around and went with us to
the toxic barbeque.
Yeah.
Grabbed it.
Went right out.
Like it was nothing.
After the initial haunting.
And just pro.
Just fucking took it.
And so, you know, we got all these wonderful shots.
We wanted ‑‑ I really wanted and Rachel really wanted to capture these events that
were on the periphery of DEF CON and not just make it about this beige room has these people.
And ‑‑ I also knew for us attendees.
Many of us never go to the toxic barbeque.
Many of us never go to the shoot.
So what does that thing look like?
And so this kind of footage to me was a real gift and why the movie starts with them.
Because otherwise you would never know, you know, that this was happening.
This is interesting because what you're seeing here is you're seeing General Alexander and
Jeff walking.
But what you're really seeing is a new cameraman.
Steve Fish.
Steve Fish learning how to do the walk‑and‑talk and the West Wing Adam Sorkin shot where he
started just walking backwards through many different hallways with people clearing the
way while the two of these guys ‑‑ while these two guys talked about DEF CON.
And I had no use for this in the main movie.
But I made it the beginning of the preview.
Because in it, Jeff is basically General Alexander says, what's up with the guys?
Is this like crew?
Do you have like news crews?
And he's like, no, this is our people.
And he proceeds to explain to General Alexander, who would be number one on the list of people
who would not give a shit about this, the nature of the DEF CON documentary and why
the DEF CON documentary was made and what the planning was and why they're doing it.
So I made that the introduction of the preview because I just thought it was hilarious that
he's like, so, General Alexander, while you're off doing whatever you do, here's why we made
the DEF CON documentary.
And the DEF CON documentary is going to be an explanation.
And it was crazy.
And the whole time, Steve is walking backwards filming people.
It's a Stanley Kubrick one-take masterpiece of not getting hit with anything.
So it's crazy.
And so anyway.
I would say it probably helped that General Alexander's Secret Service people were screaming,
clear the hall!
Clear the hall!
Yeah.
That was working out well.
They weren't doing that for us.
Yeah.
Not for us.
They should have been.
You know, when you see the interviews that are done with the DEF CON logo behind them,
here's wins, what would happen is that in our hotel room, this is our hotel headquarters
again, I moved the couch, stole a DEF CON banner, hung it up behind it with basically
my light gear and a microphone stand and a chair and then swung it behind them.
And these are like kind of the more pro, quote, unquote, you know, like, oh, here's a thing
behind me and I'm talking about this.
So that's why it's here.
And I conducted most of these on the Monday afterwards.
These were people like Wynn and Dan Kaminski and others who had been there and I hadn't
had a chance to interview them otherwise and they sat.
Dan Kaminski moved the flight to be interviewed and, you know, I was able to get a whole bunch
more interviews.
So in the movie you'll see a lot of these with the DEF CON logo.
This is the set up that I would use.
And what I would do is I would be interviewing a person on there.
No notes.
No anything.
And then interviewing the person through a whole bunch of questions.
So a bunch of people sat this way.
And this was how we were able to get a few more, quote, unquote, pro interviews without
too much trouble.
I also filmed over in one of the rooms here.
And if you listen on the soundtrack, you can hear DEF CON just kind of like floating
in the background.
This is just the sound, the thrushing sound of people and things.
And I had to do enormous amounts of sound editing, which I'll go on afterwards.
But this is kind of the set up from the side.
It was always fun when, like, Russ would see me and be like, where's Jason?
I have Ms. Kitty.
She's ready to interview right now.
And then we had to find you.
He'll find me.
And I was also just kind of walking up to people and going, hey, want to be interviewed?
And many people would say yes and many would say no.
And I would drag them off and interview them.
So it was, like, completely random like that.
And I did that ‑‑ I was doing that through a lot of it.
That was how I was spending my day.
And, again, because I was doing that through a lot of it.
People were pulling out play sports that we had given them in all sorts of different
locations.
So we were getting little, tiny bonus ‑‑ now, most of the ‑‑ with the exception
of the scav hunt who produced about 20 hours of it, we had most people produce between
three and seven minutes.
Because they're in frigging DEFCON.
They don't want to film it.
So they're shooting their thing and they're doing a collection of little shots and fucking
with things and doing stuff and then being done with it.
So there wasn't a whole lot to go through at the end, but there were people actually
using these.
And they were very usable.
So it actually turned out to be a pretty good gamble for what it was.
There was a couple times that we would film people and then they would sober up and they
would find us and be, like, you can't put that in there.
The most common thing was people would idly say to their bosses, and I'm in a documentary.
And their boss would say, and you're not.
Okay.
Sometimes they were government employees.
Sometimes they, I don't know, got the fear of God in them and thought they had said something
stupid or incriminating.
And so they would come and find us.
And I think we would delete it.
We would bodily delete the files.
Because to be honest, like, 99.9% of the people had no problem with us filming.
Right?
So you can't be, like, well, how dare you.
We filmed it.
It's ours now.
You know?
I mean, I wanted to respect these people.
I didn't want anyone to regret being in our film.
Or at least minimize it.
And one way to minimize it was to respect people who were, like, no, I don't want to
be in this, it turns out.
Or I'm not comfortable with it.
That only happened a few times.
It only happened a few times.
I only had a couple people who I'd sit down, interviewed, who said, can you not put in any
part where I discuss this subject?
I decided not.
That's not a good idea.
And I said, okay.
Fine.
Fine.
You know?
I don't like playing that game of you said this was okay and now we own the footage and
we're going to use it.
I mean, you're making the wrong movie.
You are making movies wrong as far as I'm concerned in general if you're doing that.
If you have to be that, you know, don't act like you're frigging exposing some underground
orchid ring.
You know?
Don't act like you're, like, frigging morally safer and you've just caught people out.
That's not the movie I want to make.
So.
So minimal deletion happened, but it did happen.
One of the ways you should never don't do this.
I thought ‑‑ I was interviewing some drunk people.
And drunk people are funny.
And I said ‑‑ and they were going to give me the postmortem of how they won or
lost the hacker jeopardy.
And so they are toasted.
Right?
right? They're super sized drunk, right? And so I said, it would be funnier to do it in
the bathroom. It got weird. So what happened here is that basically ‑‑ and there's
footage of this, right? Because it's on. And I go, all right, let's go into the bathroom
and let's do this. So we go in and there's the casino host who had been using the bathroom,
who came out and said, no. This didn't make it into the movie. But I will always remember
it's not the guy with the white pants, but the one next to him. He's a little obscured
here. The camera comes around. They're lined up to present. And the guy looks over and
goes, oh, what the fuck?
Like,
just that exasperation. Goddamn, a camera crew. I am pissing. Anyway, didn't make it
into the movie. Don't go into a bathroom. You know, the only other time we weren't really
allowed to film was because at one point we unwittingly, I swear to God, unwittingly,
we wandered up, one of the crews wandered up in the beginning behind some goons who
were talking. Never approach a goon from the back.
And the goons turned around and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't be filming us. No, no.
And so we made sure from that point to literally approach them from the front or to film from
a distance and not to record them. Because if they're working and they're busy and they're
making decisions and they're discussing it and what do we do with this? Even at the screening
last night there was a goon incident. But you didn't hear it, right? Which was somebody
decided ‑‑ well, he was drunk. All right, fine. That's already base level. But he decided he didn't need to go to the bathroom.
And so he just pissed himself, pissed the area and fell off his chair asleep.
Thanks for the free beer, Jeff. And a goon had to get up and quietly go over
there during this movie while the goons are talking about how hard their job is and roll
this drunk and get him out of there. So you don't hear about that. So we ended up getting
him out of there. So, yeah, great place. So the goons are always working like this.
They're working on things you don't have to see. And so they ask that we not have their
internal discussions. Otherwise, it was free and clear. Free and clear. Best quote of the
whole thing was we had this happen. And so I'm not going to tell you how they were, but,
yeah, so we said, okay, we won't shoot this.
You know, the best moment for me will always be where I was shooting. You can see me here
shooting behind RenderMan. And RenderMan uses this slide, which is the Kaminsky problem.
I'm always put up across Dan Kaminsky. So I never see his talks, and it's really silly.
And he wants to see my talks. I never get to see them live. He doesn't get to see my
live. That is the exact moment I realize Kaminsky is on stage somewhere.
. Yes. Yes.
And Dan Kaminski for his bit is a rather famed speaker and I consider RenderMan a classic
DEF CON speaker but so is Kaminski and I realized I had aimed all of my team towards RenderMan's
talk and had nobody assigned to Kaminski's talk which I was not aware of where it was
being held.
So and I said last night, this is like the kind of dream sequence, you do this in your
dreams is I'm standing behind somebody at his presentation.
He mentioned something.
I'm like, I must be there now.
And I run off the stage onto my Segway, onto my winged beast and fly through DEF CON at
like 20 miles an hour, like as fast as the thing goes.
And I pass Eddie and I'm like, Eddie, go to Penn and Teller and film Kaminski.
And I fly further and I think I hit Drew somewhere up there.
I was like, Drew, also, see if you can fly.
Film Kaminski in Penn and Teller.
And I zoom into the Penn and Teller space.
Kaminski has packed Penn and Teller.
And there are 100 people, 40 minutes or 20 minutes into his own talk waiting to maybe
get into Kaminski's speech.
That's how for some places their job requirement is you must see Kaminski's speech live.
I zoom past them like it's nothing.
See you, bitches.
Go through the doors, the double dutch doors where there's Kaminski's speech in the Penn
and Teller room, drop my Segway, run down the center aisle and jump on stage and get
behind Kaminski and start filming him as if it was no thing.
And nobody shot me.
I could just do this.
Truly God mode.
I just wall hacked DEF CON and ended up behind him.
And there's a really funny tweet.
There's a tweet from somebody going, what the fuck is up with the cowboy?
Like somebody is on like watching this from their room.
And they saw the shot with Kaminski and they're like, what's up with the cowboy?
And then later, lol, Jason Scott.
So that was one of my things.
Otherwise this would have never happened.
And we ended up using both of them and putting them together in the movie and we got all
these great shots because we had that reactiveness.
Eddie came in, started filming, and I actually zoomed back and forth a couple times to get
both and get as much as I could of the footage and the goodbyes.
So it was purely, purely luck that he even mentioned Kaminski at all.
Otherwise we would have missed it.
Weird moment.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
So our crew, after we finished, we sort of debriefed and found that, you know, they
had all been asked a lot of the same questions over and over and over again as they were
doing this.
So some of those questions were pretty straightforward.
A lot of these things up here we've either already answered or will answer by the time
we get to the end of this presentation.
There were some that were a little bit more out there.
So I want to talk about those for a minute.
So the first one, you know, people really wanted to know when we wanted to film them,
if I agree to be in this, you know, am I going to end up feeling embarrassed for being in
this movie?
Yeah, get rid of it.
Sorry.
So, you know, the answer there is, of course, as Jason was talking about, we did not set
out to intentionally embarrass anyone.
This is not a kind of movie of, like, look at the weird hackers or that kind of thing.
So we also know that there's a lot of crazy shit that goes on at DEF CON and we wanted
to capture that.
But everybody who was doing stuff like what you saw on this slide, you know, they knew
what they were getting themselves into.
We made sure of that.
People who were here last year that had these badges, people wanted to know what our badge
was, because one of the parts of the ‑‑ aspect of the badge challenge was you could
take the human badge.
You hold it up next to another badge and they would kind of communicate with each other.
And they had a ‑‑ aspect of the challenge was to communicate it with all of the different
kinds of badges.
So we had a press badge, which was a little bit rare, I guess, to find.
And so people wanted to scan them.
And at first we found this was a little bit disruptive, like we couldn't get down the
hall once people started doing it.
And then we realized, well, we could just interview these people.
So when people would come up and ask ‑‑
Just scan the badge, we'd say, all right, you can scan it, but then talk to us about
what you're doing here at DEF CON.
And that worked out pretty nicely.
This one was a little weird.
We got a lot of people asking us for help.
And my only ‑‑ you know, they would ask directions.
They would ask us about the schedule.
Somebody came up to me during one of the talks and said a guy popped his knee and he needs
a wheelchair.
And I was like, I'm in no ‑‑ I'm filming a documentary.
I'm in no position to do that.
And so, you know, we would point them towards the goons or towards other people that we
thought we could help ‑‑ could actually help them.
It was a little weird.
And the only reason I could think is because, like, we had these orange vests and sometimes
we had the walkie talkies and we looked like authority figures.
But it's strange to me at DEF CON where people seem pretty conscious of that, they would
just be like, walkie talkie, authority figure, like, this guy is wearing silk pajamas, for
Christ's sake.
Like, this is not someone you, you know, should be putting all your faith in.
Speaking of those vests, there was a lot of interest in them.
Not too many people wanted a Rufius, but people did want ‑‑
Everybody wanted a Rufius.
They wanted to know, oh, where can I get one of those vests and, you know, as I mentioned
at the beginning, these vests were custom made for this.
We just made them for our crew.
But of course you can order orange vests anywhere.
But this was a one‑time thing.
Okay.
So a lot of friendly people at DEF CON offered our crew drinks at all times of day.
Most of the time we were like, oh, we're working, thanks, no, thank you, maybe later.
Sometimes towards the end of the night we were known to accept a beer or cocktail or
in this case a swig of homemade absinthe.
But ‑‑ Two words that need to go together.
Yes.
So it was very friendly.
And I guess we're lucky that nobody Rufied us.
No, there's a great ‑‑ there's a great footage ‑‑ I had to watch every second
of footage.
So there's one footage with Eddie that I love, which is someone's like, Jason, I have
no choice, hand comes out, beer leaves, goes behind camera.
I'm sorry, Jason.
It all worked out.
A lot of people suggested we should make this documentary every year.
No comment.
But in the end, we didn't break anything.
We didn't lose anything.
We didn't lose any of our equipment.
We didn't lose any of our footage.
We didn't get in too much trouble.
I think it was a success.
After we were done, we took our crew out to relax in Las Vegas for a couple ‑‑ like
a day and a half.
They got a day.
They got about a day after that.
We basically said, we have no requirement for you for Monday.
And so I made sure the rooms were booked from Monday to Tuesday morning and that they would
fly out on Tuesdays so they could have a day of their own.
They did go karting and went out to eat and went to places and we went to Pepper Mill.
You know, just generally got there.
We got to see Vegas because, again, for a couple of them, this was it.
This was their first time in Vegas.
So we took them to the Encore and Pepper Mill and I took them over to Luxor just to see
it and everything else.
Just so you can actually see ‑‑ get your head up out of DEF CON and there's actually
a Vegas here.
Just a little gift.
Okay.
Just so you know.
Wow.
You can do this.
So just as a thing, we're going to go through this.
We're going to show a little bit of footage at the end.
But if you have places to go, totally understood.
And we'll do this until they kick us out of the room.
But anyway.
So editing and finalizing.
So now suddenly I ended up with all this footage.
Now how do you put it all together?
At one point Rachel said, how are you making the plot of this?
And I'm like, here's how you do it.
And this is literally what I drew in the restaurant.
And this was my plan.
And she was not happy.
But the way that I approach these things is pretty straightforward.
I tend to take all the footage and I watch all the footage.
And then I put clips out.
I go like, you know, render man, colon, I don't get nervous before I speak.
And it will be like that's what it's described.
And there will be another one going like shot, walking from here to here.
Or it will be like guy starts to get angry but then realizes who we are.
Or things like that.
So there will be like shots and things.
And I start to put them into a classification.
And I start building up these little sequences.
Where I'm like.
Here's a bunch of people talking about there's lots of drinking at DEFCON.
Or speeches are hard to put together.
Or I'm here to meet people.
Or these people are my family.
And I start assembling them in great amounts.
And then eventually it starts getting to the point that I end up trying to put together
like minded shots over these sequences to illustrate things until finally this is actually
what the final piece looks like before I printed it.
And so as you can see.
There's well over 2,000 or 3,000 cuts in the movie.
This is what took me.
It took me two and a half months to go through the ultimate.
It was 278 hours of footage.
I went through that and produced from it 6,000 clips.
The 6,000 clips then got ‑‑ I probably used probably 1,500 of them.
And then those 1,500 had something like 3,000 edits done to them.
In many cases.
I fix what people are saying.
I take away ums and ahs.
I remove weird sounds.
We've had a lot of progression software wise.
So I could remove clangs or phone rings.
Or in a couple cases unintended air conditioning sounds.
I would only do this at the end just to remove the air conditioning sounds so you couldn't
hear what the person was saying over it.
And then steadying the shots and removing line noise or I should say video noise so
that they looked better.
And I was very pleased.
I got one sequence done and we were like okay, there's going to be a movie here.
And that was the speaker sequence with RenderMan and Kaminsky.
We were like yup, there's a movie here.
They were shot with all different footage.
It all works.
There's no question we have a movie here.
And I was very happy.
So that was months and months and months and months of work.
I put the final touch on the final thing for this thing on June ‑‑ no.
July 3rd.
So ‑‑.
So I was editing.
I took a month off, you know, and I would come back to it and stuff.
I estimate I've probably seen the full movie about 170 times.
So I mean I've seen this movie ‑‑ I can just sit here.
I do this with a lot of my movies.
I can just sit in the back just kind of mouthing everything everyone is saying.
And then anticipating it because I just know it by heart.
And there's a syndrome that I call which is over familiarity syndrome.
I'll shoot somebody dancing.
And then I'll live with it for months.
And when I see the guy ‑‑.
Buddy!
Who the fuck is this guy and why is he acting like we're lovers?
And the answer is because I've been looking at your lovely face for three months like
some sort of errant creepy fan.
So how do you get in for Christmas?
You don't.
Got up to Christmas and we're like, ah, fuck, no way.
And it was a big stress because he was like, I made a promise.
So we compromised and made a 20‑minute version.
And I put that out.
But ultimately the movie did take.
I mean.
I think the movie was more footage than I ever dealt with before.
And the previous ones were like over a year of editing.
The fact that I was able to edit it in about nine months is crazy and an enormous amount
of work.
You know, well over a thousand something hours of editing and fixing and refining and finding
things and dealing with it.
There was surprisingly little editorial control executed upon me by Jeff who had written the
check for this and for paying me.
Jeff's check paid ‑‑ I took a flat fee up front.
That paid all of my credit cards off and paid off my car.
And so I was debt free, which is the biggest gift in this world.
And so I was debt free.
And I ‑‑ that made a huge difference in my life.
So for me the amount of work done was irrelevant because my life was so much better.
And so he didn't ‑‑ there was one part that mentioned a specific number of how much
something cost.
They asked that go out because it could cause contract problems to be publicizing that.
There was one sequence he asked to be taken down from 2 minutes and 30 seconds and I returned
with a sequence that was 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
So that didn't work.
And there was like a couple other shots where they're like, does it have to be this shot
or can it be this?
And I said fine.
It's like really no ‑‑ honestly, for the fact that he completely paid for it, pretty
much none.
None.
Zero.
So that went really well.
It ended up being available here.
I had nothing to do with how they put it together and I'm really amazed at what they came up
with.
So you can download the whole movie for free.
The torrent is either up now or will be up today at media.defcon.org.
And they have a ‑‑ I wanted it on a USB stick.
There was debates almost up to a few months ago of it being on Blu-ray and I'm like Blu-ray
is not the way things can happen now.
It's not.
It's USB stick.
Make it a downloadable thing.
And so they created this crazy deluxe lunchbox hard drive thing without telling me.
And it's amazing.
And they thought they were only ‑‑ I'll say this amount.
They thought they were only ever going to sell 50 and they sold 50 the first day on
preorder.
It was like, yeah, people love this frigging thing.
So I'm really happy that it's gotten that beautiful amount of reception.
Conclusions?
It's hard.
Doubly hard.
This is them literally recording me asleep.
Bastards.
Segway turned out to be a really good idea.
Throw a segway into the mix.
Alex will always get in a shot.
See in the corner there?
Alex will always get in a shot.
To be fair, I think Alex was just so excited to be here.
He got a little swept up in the ‑‑
He got a little.
So what would happen is a couple times something would be going on and he would like get right
in it.
And he's so adorable, but he's everywhere.
And, you know, we didn't ever look at this thing as something we had to finish.
Like, oh, we're going to film people.
Let's film people and that's a movie.
We're done here.
You know, we never sat down and said, you know, okay, we're going to make it ‑‑ we'll
film it and we'll be done with the movie.
I wanted a movie that changed people's perceptions of DEF CON or changed their own love of DEF
CON to something even stronger.
Or encouraged people to understand how magical this thing is and how it happens.
Right?
And I gave a year of my life to get that story out.
And that was what we tried to do.
And this is our crew getting their vows during the closing ceremonies for one moment and
then running back into their places to keep filming.
I think some of them were filming still while we were on stage.
Yeah, still filming.
They left it going and everything else.
So that is the main part of our talk.
Let me just ‑‑ yeah, let's swap.
Yeah.
They don't care.
So we're going to sneak this until they kick us out.
Let me just quickly ‑‑ so, all right, oh, wow, oh, wow, so I won't be able to do that.
That's amazing.
No, no, here.
Do it.
They're all in ‑‑ nope, not that.
All right.
Wait, wait, here.
This is exciting.
Do this.
You drive.
I'll point.
All right.
Which one do you want me to start with?
All right.
Let's do this.
It's like karaoke.
I know.
It's exactly like karaoke.
Click on extra bits.
Yeah.
That one on the right.
All right.
So let me show you an example of something that's wonderful and beautiful and I didn't
use it.
It would be top left, the first one.
It's actually been really awesome.
I have met a lot of people.
Through the people who have been going before me, I have met a lot of other really interesting,
awesome people.
I go to dinner with somebody and find out later that, you know, it was somebody extremely
important that I had no idea.
They just forgot to mention or something.
But ‑‑ sorry.
I'm getting a little excited.
Yeah.
So it's like there's somebody who what he's saying is I found a place where I belong and
people respect and trust me.
And it's a beautiful moment.
And I didn't put it in the end because I had all these other beautiful moments.
Which beautiful moment is going to get screwed without turning this movie even longer?
It happened all the time.
Let's skip that one.
Go to the third one.
This is the kind of great stuff.
Anyway, so what happened was ‑‑ Motherfuckers!
That basically ‑‑ Motherfuckers!
That basically ‑‑ You know, we would always get those kind
of helpful responses.
Let's go with second to the bottom on the left.
I have to hear every second footage.
And I would hear things like this.
.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
So, as soon as we're done with this interview, .
.
So you're telling Jason Scott that you need to take a dump?
Yeah.
Pretty much.
All right.
Red dump.
And you have to listen because you don't know what you're going to miss.
That was the Red Crew.
Yeah.
So.
So I'm going to do ‑‑ what's the ‑‑ oh, yeah, upper right, you know, here's a case
of me taking some footage I didn't expect and I decided to do something with it.
A very special moment. Yeah, let's do the professional thing. Remember,
he says some of the most emotional, meaningful things.
Sorry, I don't know what's happening. Turn it off if you can.
It's dead to me. He looked at his phone to see his notes on
how he was going to do an answer. And we just destroy him.
We have the same phone. Oh, this part here.
I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on.
I made the most friends when I was working the scavenger hunt.
This was ‑‑ sorry. The scavenger hunt is very important to me.
I don't know what's wrong with me about it. Sorry, I'm tweeting.
Sorry, I'm tweeting. Are you tweeting that the documentary crew
is making fun of you? I'm tweeting.
Demetri ‑‑ Come to 874 for verbal abuse.
Demetri ‑‑ Scandinavian hunt charged my
leg. Penis.
Penis. Heart, heart, heart.
Well, I was going to tell you some things that you may not realize.
All right. Well, show me. Bring it out to me.
All right. Bring it out.
Great. Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
Let's fucking do this.
I am so ready. I want you to think of this interview as a scrotum.
I'm just going to scratch it gently then.
Bring it out. Bring it out.
All right. So ‑‑
Grab the left nut.
Grab the left nut.
And just tug. Gently. Let's not ‑‑
Do it.
Let's not get hurt. Okay. So ‑‑ fucking balls.
Bitch.
We're trying to be professionals here. We're fucking professionals.
Hi.
All right. So ‑‑
So what's great about that is if you see the movie, you're like, oh, that's what came
just before it, before he talks about it.
He came out with some great stuff right now.
Beautiful stuff. Here's footage that ‑‑ okay, there's a time lapse where somebody
goes from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It's the bottom one. No, it's the bottom one, yeah.
It's the sunset.
Yeah, do it. And we ‑‑ so basically what happened was ‑‑
What's that?
Windows media players decided it does not love you or care about you.
Oh, wait, wait. This one.
So what happened here was that basically I ended up with this beautiful time lapse, and
then I ended up ‑‑ I had this other one here where somebody sent me a beautiful time
lapse of the sunset.
Yeah.
And it was the sun down at the Rio. It's flickering because it just completely made
my shit flip out. It was like three gigs of JPEGs. And I tried to stuff them in the thing.
As you can ‑‑ I mean, I could have fixed it a little bit, but after a while I said,
you know, this was going to be like Friday night, you know, now whatever, and it was
going to go down.
So it's this absolutely beautiful footage that I just never got a chance to use. All
right. Knock that one out. We'll switch over.
This was the greatest thing that ever happened in the entire world. Just click on it. Third
one up on the right.
All right. Here's the deal. Nope, not that one. Yeah, just pull this one up. Boom.
Okay. So here's the deal with this guy. In the original footage they're shooting, and
you can hear one of the other team members go, get that guy, which guy, that guy, that
guy, and they turn and there's this guy. All right? Now, I don't know this guy. I
don't know him. We never know who he was. Bless this man.
So we're shooting party footage, and we're shooting this guy. Now, I mean, this guy,
he's a little bit, you know, what's the word? He's a little height weight, non-ratio bound.
He's dancing, and he's listening to this music, and he is dancing, and he doesn't stop.
And now most people would be in this situation would go, okay, I got my shit done, and then
like walk or calm down.
You can see the other people in the back, you know, the guy in the back left there.
Look at him. He's a little wiry stick, and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And then
this happened.
Put your fucking hands up!
And he is back. And if you look down at the crawler, you know, we're nowhere near done.
I mean, this guy just keeps on going.
So whenever we would have lagging energy.
On any of the teams, it'd be like 2 in the morning, and it'd be like, I don't know if we could,
put your fucking hands up!
And we'd like run back into the crowd and do more filming.
And just for the rest of the whole weekend, put your fucking hands up!
Yeah, that was our rallying cry.
So there's like one second or two seconds of him dancing in the Saturday night sequence as a tribute to him.
So we have no idea who this guy is.
I mean, someday, I mean, sure, we'll hear from him, but he is incredible.
And I know he's probably at his desk right now, looking at this scene.
He's probably like, this thing, in December, going by on the video.
Oh, fuck!
Oh, no!
Alright, um, let me see.
Um, let's do underwater, just because it has a great line from Rachel.
We were testing the underwater ability.
We mentioned that these cameras, the little play sports, were supposedly able to go underwater,
but we weren't positive.
I didn't check the mood.
If it didn't work, we're not telling Jason how this happened.
Oh, shit, I recorded that.
And that's the shot I used the credits with him clapping his hands.
But the sound here is beautiful.
Here we go.
He'll only know if it works.
Record up here and then dunk it while it's recording and see how well it works.
It's recording right now.
Oh, okay, go.
Go for it.
It didn't turn off.
So, guess what?
Those play sports are actually pretty awesome.
So we actually were able to put a few in there.
Did we fix the crash footage?
Good.
This is a PDP crash.
What would happen?
What sort of terrible creature would be born?
A whole union of man and machine.
A virtual computer.
A virtual computer.
A virtual computer that's creating a new race.
Yeah, I indicated this was some sort of beating dance.
A young man, a young man, nostalgic for himself.
It was late.
Oh!
The PDP-11 crashed!
I may have been drinking.
Hardware crash.
That's one of, yeah, like, you know, we definitely found time.
To pop out.
Why don't we go up out.
Let's go into one of the bonus things.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, bonus.
So these are bonus features.
This is all on the USB sticks.
So all these pieces here.
The ones you just saw were not.
Yeah, the other ones there, those are ones that are not in the thing.
Let me see if there's one that really, like, kind of captures the, like, a lot of these
are meant to be, you know, varying states of informative and I have, like, very long
things on CDC and things on the hacking for charity.
You know, things that were important to me.
We had, like, important stories and then there's, yeah, I know, you're, like, poor in Santa,
but let's make him the last thing.
Wait, wait.
So down one.
Down one.
And to the right.
There you go.
Then there's this.
Then there's this story saved for all time.
All right, so we had went to the New York, New York, to that terrible Asian restaurant
they have in there, that terrible Chinese joint, and they had Mongolian beef and then
we went back.
and threw the party in the room.
And so I got a little bit too drunk, shall we say.
And at the end of the night, as everybody was, you know,
as the party rolled down, I ended up in my bathroom, in my bedroom,
and I just lost all of it.
It looked like somebody grabbed a big old plate of Mongolian beef
and just threw it around the entire bathroom.
It was awful.
I mean, while it looked like it was just normal Mongolian beef,
of course it didn't smell that way.
So, you know, we wake up the next morning,
and I'm intending to clean it up,
but everyone's like, ah, let's go get breakfast.
We'll clean it up after.
So we're rolling back to the hotel,
and we're walking up to the hotel room,
and this poor maid, oh, the look on her face was awful.
She walks out of the room.
And she looks at us, because she knows we have the hotel room.
She's like, someone in there go blah.
It's so bad, I go blah.
Like, we made the maid at DEF CON vomit.
I feel so bad for this poor lady.
I think we handed her $60 or something as a tip.
I just apologized.
And that is, that's the Mongolian beef story right there, in a nutshell.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
I came up to offer you water.
I'm throwing up.
Oh, yeah.
He's sitting naked in his jacket.
Yes.
I'm like, you want some water?
Fuck you.
No, you want some water?
Fuck me.
Oh, yeah.
The AC had frozen, and the smell was awful,
and I was just sweating bullets, you know,
naked, laying in a pile of my own vomit on the floor.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's, whoo, yeah.
That's a high moment.
You were going to let me walk out of here.
Without that golden footage, you were just going to be like,
I had a good time, and I threw some parties.
DEF CON was good.
For some reason, I stopped going.
Goodbye.
Congratulations on 20 years, Jeff.
I support you.
Very good.
What's the only thing that happened at DEF CON?
What I love about that is at that moment, you can hear,
there's like 12 other people in the room,
because I'm going through this whole crowd,
and they're all trying to stay as quiet as possible
while he tells this disgusting story,
and then they just lose it as soon as I start talking.
Let's do the upper right one, top quality production.
You're like, you need a blooper reel, right?
All right, blooper reel.
One of the things that, I don't know.
Quality production.
I look forward to seeing this in the film.
Yeah, seeing that exact thing in the film.
Yes.
But are there principles, and, oh, Jesus, balls.
I told you, it's the quiet one.
It's the quiet one.
Watch.
It's the Metrolink.
It's the quiet ones that always kill people.
Oh, that's the Chicago train.
Have fun in Chicago on Wednesday.
Not that I know anything about the train nor anybody here.
It's busted.
What?
We're contemplating the perfect fucking shot.
Whatever.
You know what?
Get back to work, or we'll throw you out.
I don't want to be on camera again.
Not creepy at all.
Good shot here of the room, and, you know, us putting things together
and doing stuff, and then, you know what this needs?
This needs to be done.
This needs a close-up.
It's also...
It really feels like death.
Wow.
Well, then.
Blew out the transformer.
Transformer.
But everything's on batteries, so it's still recording.
I have one fucking light.
I'm a nice guy, but I...
Like, sometimes I'm not a nice guy.
And I'm just like, shut up.
It's not my...
You can hear him giggling.
That's Russ giggling in the darkness.
I just didn't want you to break your cord.
That is awesome.
You know what the best part is?
I have that completely on camera.
Holy balls.
I use balls a lot.
Do we...
Okay, so...
Oh, yeah.
Porn Santa.
The epic story.
The epic story of Porn Santa.
Yes.
Ho, ho, ho!
Oh, my God.
What do you got there?
We got random porn.
We got a pile of porn sandwiches.
Yeah, exactly.
What?
Ho, ho, ho!
Yeah!
Porno!
Never found out the story there.
Whoa!
That's some Capcom porn.
What's that?
That was happening at DEFCON.
I also like it because you do get a sense of, you know,
the vendor area and how much of a con it is.
Oh, wow!
That's what you thought of?
Oh, oh, oh.
Very good.
Dude, take my porn.
Come on, dude.
Be a buddy.
Be a buddy.
Take my porn.
Come on, guys.
Come on.
I love that.
People are like, you know, fuck no.
Because the guy's going to get a shirtless person.
I don't need any porn.
Come on.
Take the porn.
I love this.
He's just going around showing porn in people's faces.
Funny story.
Funny story about Porn Santa.
So here's the deal.
He was going along and he found in a room a bag of porn.
Okay?
So his solution was to go out into the vendor area and just hand out all the porn he found.
Here's the problem.
The porn was actually a clever trick being done by, I believe it was the NinjaTel guys.
And there was a ninja badge in one of them.
So unwittingly, he gave away a ninja badge.
And they decided that was even funnier and better.
So there was no hard feelings between anybody and Porn Santa.
We have many hours of little epic events like this.
Of vendor areas and places and people.
Yep.
Just.
Just.
Lots and lots.
Lots.
Hey, I'm American.
Good to see you guys.
And there's SkyDog.
It's just really kind of neat.
So isn't it nice to have this little piece of DEFCON history saved forever on hundreds of USB sticks and torrents around the world?
DEFCON.
Definitely.
Oh yeah, we're kid friendly.
We have DEFCON kids here.
I love how many people are like, nah, fuck no.
I don't need this.
You know?
No.
Apparently we have evidence of who doesn't need porn.
Yeah.
Look at this.
They're negotiating.
I don't think.
Are you sure?
Really?
Dude.
Free porn.
There's no way to look.
Here.
Take it, you jerk.
Just fucking take it.
God damn it.
Santa Claus.
Santa Claus has so many children to deliver to this year.
Yeah, sure.
Go ahead.
I got to go hit my contest.
I hope that was good for you.
The epic journey of porn Santa.
People are now coming in.
I think it's respectful to like clear the room for the next crowd.
So again, thanks so much.
If anyone has like a burning, burning question.
Yeah.
I'll, I'll, I'll answer it right now if there is.
Anyone have a burning question?
They're like, what, what?
You didn't.
What's the screening?
The screening is tonight at eight o'clock in track three, I believe.
Either two or three.
It's, it's the track that Hacker Jeopardy is not happening in.
But it's at eight o'clock tonight.
And we'll screen the whole movie and, and even answer some questions afterwards.
And maybe play a little other bonus footage if people are still up for it.
And have a good time.
Was it worth it?
Of course it was worth it.
It was a wonderful time.
Rachel and I had a lot of fights over many things.
And a lot of screaming about getting this and that done.
But I think at the end, the product speaks for itself.
And I think that we have a, a really special piece of work.
And without, you know, Kyle and Drew and Alex and Rick.
Oh, can we get them to come up here?
Yeah.
Some of our crew are here today.
Any of my crew members, just come on up and say hi.
Just, just come up and wave.
You can do it.
You're smart people.
Stage, stage.
Get on the stage or we won't be able to see you.
So, yeah.
So here's our gang.
Lovely Alex.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And so, and so, yeah.
So, so here's our gang who are here.
And, and Drew was here yesterday for the premiere.
But he had to go back to Hawaii where he lives now.
And, and Rick is busy in Florida.
But, you know.
Yeah, no.
It was out, without these people.
Without Alex and, and Rick and Drew and, and Kyle and everyone else.
We wouldn't have it.
We wouldn't have this movie.
No way.
So, so thank you so much.
Do you want to say anything, Rachel?
Nope.
Nope.
Okay.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for sitting through.